Last night someone appealed on Freecycle to have a stray kitten taken off his hands. Our perennial talk of adding a kitten to our roster had recently become more serious; so, in short, we are the new guardians of a scrawny black tomkitten named Pillow.
We had heard that it’s good to keep the new and incumbent cats separated for a few days until each is accustomed to the presence of the other’s scent; so Pillow is temporarily confined to the master bedroom, the rest of the apartment remaining Fluffie’s sole domain for the time being.
Another trick we’ve heard of is to smear butter on the kitten’s head and get Fluffie to lick it off, thus tricking her into a bit of maternal bonding.
Thursday: Vet says he’s three months old, though tiny for that age. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how he can be so neglected and so tame. (He hisses and struggles when I pull him from his hiding-place, but then is quite content to be held.) Though afflicted with fleas, roundworm and a respiratory infection, he is happily free of leukemia/immunodeficiency virus. His isolation will continue for a couple of weeks.
The human occupant of the master bedroom is in the habit of getting up in the wee hours for a spot of zazen, and reports that Pillow does his best to disrupt her meditations.
Cat fotos pls.
“The world wide web exists so geeks can show each other pictures of their cats”
No camera, alas!
A year goes by. Fluffie still has not responded to Pillow with anything but hostility, alas, but mostly tolerates his presence so long as he’s out of (human) arm’s reach.
Almost four years after he vanished, it occurs to me that he must have been separated from his family at a very early age: else he’d have learned not to claw his playmates.