by Wendy V. Smith (Originally written 2011; edited for Blog November 2019)
To me, the dog and the cats were pets but to my parents the dog protected the house against the bush wolves and coyotes while the cats kept the mice and moles down to a minimum. This is a memory of the cats and especially of Bobby, the Cross-eyed Cat…
One day my Dad brought home a box of 4 kittens. Smokey was solid gray female cat, the colour of dark smoke. Blacky was, well, solid black male. Candy was light gray and white male, very pretty reminding me of sweet candy. And Bobby was a dark tabby female resembling a bobcat. Bobby’s front legs were unusually short and she had one eye that looked the wrong way earning her the nickname “The Cross-eyed Cat.” She must have been left too long without human contact as a kitten, because she had a wild nature, unfriendly and rarely could be caught, touched or petted. My brother Wayne and I suffered from long bloody scratches down our arms in our many attempts to socialize her that only contributed to furthering her anti-social behaviour.
The following is a little story of Bobby a few years after they arrived in that box when I was about 8 years old and Wayne was about 10.
“What are you doing Wendy?” asked Wayne one spring morning as he dunked through the small door of the wooden playhouse.
“I’m making potatoes and carrots for MaryBell’s lunch,” I replied, pinching the last of the bright yellow a daisy center into a plastic bow filled with its white tender petals.
“Bobby and Smokey are going to have babies,” Wayne announced.
“How can you tell?” I asked as I stirred water into the “vegetable” concoction. MaryBell sat patiently waiting, arms rigidly outstretched with unblinking eyes. Wayne was only 14 months older than I was and had a full set of encyclopaedias in his library making him very smart.
“Come and look at Smokey’s fat belly,” Wayne said as he pulled me out of the playhouse door and pointed to the gray cat’s belly. “See how fat she is! There are baby kittens inside.”
“Wow! When will they come out?” I asked.
“Really soon. We’ll watch Smokey and Bobby and when they’re skinny again, we’ll know they had their babies. Then we’ll find them,” Wayne said.
Every day, Wayne and I would go scouting for the females cats. While we saw Smokey almost daily, we rarely saw Bobby. Then one morning a few weeks later, while I was baking oatmeal cookies with Mom, Wayne burst into the kitchen.
“Smokey’s kittens have been born! Come on!” he squealed, grabbing two cookies and shoving one in his mouth.
“Mommy, can I go?” I asked excitedly.
“Go on,” Mom said with a reluctant smile. “Be careful and NO HAY FORTS! Stay out of the Hay Barn!” Mom told me later in life that one of her biggest nightmares was Wayne and I being suffocated in a hay fort cave-in.
I could hardly get my black rubber boots on fast enough. New kittens were so exciting. The May sun was warm and my nose breathed in the wonderful aromas of thawing mud, muck and manure as we ran into the barn yard.
“Smokey!” I called. “Here kitty-kitty-kitty.” We looked in the cow barn and in the granary.
“Here kitty-kitty-kitty,” called Wayne as we went into the hay barn.
“There she is!” I shouted, seeing Smokey’s dark gray tail disappear over the top layer of hay bales about 20 feet up. Wayne started to climb and I was not far behind, totally ignoring Mom’s warnings. The bales were stacked layer upon layer like bricks and climbing them was much like climbing a ladder without handles. I wiggled the toe of my rubber boots between the layers and grabbed handfuls of hay that were tightly wrapped into each bale.
“Help me!” I called as the hay in my grip came loose. Wayne came back down to grab my hand to pull me up to the next layer of bales.
“Grab the binder-twine – not the hay, Dummy!” Wayne said.
Finally we reached the top and began to search for a hole that a cat could fit through.
“Here,” Wayne shouted. I ran over to where he was tugging and pulling on the twine of a bale. A bale of hay is approximately 4 feet long by 2 feet high by 2 feet thick, each bound tightly in two places by binder twine. Wayne pulled out three heavy prickly bales, following a tunnel that Smokey had made. The dreaded Hay Fort maneuver.
“Shhhhh,” he whispered as he put his ear down to the hole to listen for any kitten sounds. We held our breath to be extra quiet.
“I can hear them,” Wayne whispered as he took hold of another bale carefully pulling it away.
“Oh my goodness,” I squealed as I looked down on Smokey and her three newborn kittens. Smokey was a friendly cat and very used to being handled so she only watched me cautiously as I rushed to pick up a little gray and white kitten.
“Something is wrong with them! Look. Their eyes are sealed shut!” I was almost in tears.
“There’s nothing wrong with them, Dummy!” Wayne said picking up a dark gray kitten. “They are born that way. Their eyes open later.”
“Can we take them to the house?” I asked. “I want to show Mommy.”
“No. We have to leave them here. Smokey will take good care of them. We’ll come back to visit every day to make sure they’re OK,” Wayne said. He replaced the last bale he had removed very carefully to give Smokey back her hidden den.
“Why did Smokey hide her kittens so far into the bales?” I asked Wayne as we made our way back down the bales.
“Because the male cats will eat the babies,” Wayne said very matter-of-factly.
“What!?” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “Why would they do that?”
“The males just see the babies as being little rats.” With only three feet left to go, Wayne jumped to the ground.
“Help! Wait for me!” I shouted.
“Just jump, scaredy cat,” he taunted. “Its just hay down here. You won’t hurt yourself.” I let go of my grip and fell to the soft loose hay below.
“Come on,” Wayne beckoned for me to follow him. “Let’s go and see if we can find Bobby. Maybe she’s had her kittens too. Haven’t seen her in weeks.”
It wasn’t until a couple of days later, while Wayne and I were playing outside, that I spotted Bobby. Her belly was thin and flabby.
“Look, there’s Bobby!” I shouted. “She must have had her kittens! Come on!” It wasn’t until we had chased her around the granary and through the cow barn that we caught sight of her again disappearing into the hay barn. We ran through the barn door and saw Bobby jumping up onto a low log wall. She had something in her mouth that looked like new born kitten.
“She’s eating her kittens!” I cried. “We have to catch her!”
“She might be just moving them,” Wayne shouted, out of breath. Bobby dropped the kitten and then disappeared back outside through a crack in the barn wall. We ran to the kitten but I could tell that it was dead. I touched it with my finger. It was stiff and cold and had been dead for a while.
“Oh no! We’re too late,” I wailed falling to my knees in front of the small lifeless form. Then I became very angry. “Bobby is a bad bad mother!”
“Yeah!” Wayne said, just as angry. “Let’s get her!”
Off we went again in pursuit of Bobby. We knew that this cat was always different, never friendly and always had a crazy look in that one eye. Now we had proof that the Cross-eyed Cat was evil.
We caught sight of Bobby disappearing into the empty sheep barn, another place we weren’t supposed to go. Since we hadn’t had sheep for the past few years, the barn was basically abandoned. We raced to a wooden ladder that went up into a very low loft where Wayne and I had to crawl on our bellies, ducking under the cross-beams in the roof. Once we got to the farthest side, the beam was so low, that we could not fit beyond it. We stared into the blackness where we knew Bobby was hiding.
“I’m not sticking my hand in there.” I was suddenly feeling scared and a little claustrophobic. “Bobby will bite and scratch me.”
Wayne hesitated and then bravely stretched his arm past the cross-beam, deep into the darkness. There was a growl and several angry hisses.
“I got her,” Wayne said. “Ouch! God-dammit! Look out! I’m going to pull her out!”
But what Wayne pulled out was not Bobby! It hissed and it growled. It was fuzzy with big blue-gray eyes.
“What the hell!?” exclaimed Wayne as he stared at a tabby kitten daggling from his grip on the back of its neck. “Here,” he said handing the swiping, growling kitten over to me.
“Hang on. Let me get my jacket off.” It was a struggle in the cramped loft, but with my jacket finally off, Wayne shoved the kitten down one of the arms. I held one end shut to trap it inside. Then Wayne shoved his scratched and slightly bleeding hand back into the darkness. I thought how brave my big brother was. There was more hissing and growling.
“Owowow! God-dammit! OK, I’ve got her now!” Wayne said pulling out another hissing fluffy tabby kitten.
“Well, holy cow!” Wayne laughed. “Maybe Bobby’s not so bad after all. These kittens are at least four weeks old.” He shoved the second kitten into the other arm of my jacket and dug back into the darkness. The next handful of fur was indeed Bobby. Wayne dropped her beside my jacket. Once she realized her kittens were there, her focus changed from fight mission to a rescue mission. She circled around the jacket looking for a way in.
When Wayne was confident there were no more kittens in the back of the darkness, he turned himself around and thought for moment.
“We’ll take these kittens home,” Wayne said finally. “Its too hard to get to them here. And if Bobby moves them somewhere that we can’t find, they’ll grow up wild just like her.”
“Then they’ll never be friendly?” I asked.
“Nope,” Wayne replied. “They have to get used to us handling them or you can forget ever being able to pick them up.”
It was quite a challenge getting the two frightened kittens who were bundled up in my jacket’s arms out of the low loft of that sheep barn and home. Bobby ran beside us, meowing messages to her babies, all the way to the house rarely looking anywhere but at my jacket. She was so focused on her kittens, she didn’t even hesitate, much to my mother’s dismay, to follow us into the house and into the kitchen. Never before had Bobby stayed this close to us.
Cats were not normally allowed in the house and after Mom convinced us that the Bobby’s milk was much better for the kittens that anything we could find in the kitchen, back outside we went. Dad guessed that when Bobby had her litter of kittens weeks ago, one had died and she was removing it from her den. I felt very guilty that I had misjudged her. I wanted to apologize to her in the only way I knew how with pets and cuddles. But her wild and frightened nature never allowed me the opportunity.
Bobby was different but that didn’t mean she was bad. Bobby was scared and a loner but that didn’t mean she was evil.
Life lesson!!
