A Home for Moonbeam

     I'm settled in my study for my morning writing. I hear a little kitty voice, a distinctive one that sounds like a lilting  r r r t t t with a question mark at the end. Moonbeam has a whole vocabulary of sounds. She is my best buddy, the most devoted of my four cats. This particular sound asks me a question. "Why havn't I gotten my morning hug?" A black cat with a white chin and tummy, built like a linebacker with short legs and sturdy body lands solidly on my desk, next to my computer.

     She leans into my hand, rubbing and purring, checks to see if the coast is clear and launches on to my lap. She shadows me , follows me from room to room. Wherever I am she will be there also.  And she is feral. How can that be?

     Thanks to Leslie Vogt and Jan Link of the Northern Colorado Friends of Ferals, she has had a chance to bloom, to become the sweet companion that she is. Thankfully she was picked up when she was a kitten, from a hoarding situation in a filthy alley and shed, barely protected from the elements and fighting for her food.

     Who knows if she still was with her mother. Along with being hungry she had an infected eye. I found out later it probably was a ocular hernia. Bottom line she couldn't see out of it. I don't know how much pain she was in.
  
      I learned that since she was picked up from an impossible situation she could not go back to it like most other feral cats happily return to their colonies after being spayed or neutered. She had to became a barn cat. And I had a barn. The morning I picked her up after her surgeries and shots  (and I didn't know she was a she for a year, that was how long it took to be able to touch her) along with a possible sister and another cat that might have been her mother, I had no idea how I was going to take care of these three cats. I just knew I wanted to help in any way I could.

     They were scared, hunched in the back of the live traps they were in. I remember feeling so bad for them. They were stone silent. Eventually I got them into a small room in my barn where they could become acclimated and then, when let out hopefully would stay.

     It is pretty easy to assume that feral cats are not socialized enough to become house cats. It does take some special circumstaces. It is hard to tell if a cat was abandoned or born feral but if captured at a young enough age, it is possible for them to be adopted. Of course some are clearly happy to live outside and some are abandoned house cats and once they have been treated, they can go home with a family. You just never know.

     I was careful. I didn't know how wild they were, if at all. I learned quickly that they had a ways to go. But I was patient with them. After about 5 weeks I could play with them (toy on a string) and put their food in front of them instead of moving it close to them with a stick. And I always talked to them when I went in to feed them. They won my heart.

     Shortly after they had settled into a routine, I let them out into the barn. They played in the hay and cuddled in a warm den I built inside of one of the stalls.. They began to follow me when I went to the barn to feed them, Moonbeam even came up to the house and sat under the kitchen window and meowed. Soon I was even able to pick them up occasionally.

     Sadly, because of the fox and coyotes in my area I lost both Lollipop and Polka Dot in their first year. Moonbeam was the only one left in the barn. As it got colder and she was by herself I tried to get her to come in the house. Little by little her curiosity got the best of her and she came in to explore. With hardly any fanfare, it didn't take long for her to  blend in with my other 3 cats. She loves it, is not interested in going back to the way it was. She is home.

 

Mookie Moves In

      The days after Polka Dot disappeared were dark and cold for me. But I wasn’t the only one. Moonbeam was by herself in the barn. More than once I would go out just to make sure the heating pad was working in her ‘warming house’. It was more important now that there was no other cat for her to snuggle up with. The temperature had dropped to 10 degrees and would probably be below 0 before this cold snap was through with us. When it was this cold I didn’t see her very often. She stuck close to the barn.
      But she was alone. All the time now. I know it has ben said that that cats are by nature solitary, but I don't believe it.  Little Moonbeam with only one eye was vulnerable with her gregarious sister no longer helping her.
     So after mulling it over in my mind I casually mentioned to John that if it got down to 0 degrees I would have to see if I could bring her in the house. ( I knew it would not be just for a visit) I knew I could probably pick her up and carry her in a carrier. I had been able to pick her up in the barn to doctor her once  but if it didn’t work it would be hard get her to come in again. She had actually come into the house a few times on her own, poked her head around and then run right back out.
     So I planned this elaborate plan where I would bring her into the house in a carrier and let her out while I kept the other cats in another room She very graciously went into the carrier where I had placed some treats. I closed the door and picked her up. I didn’t hear a sound. I got her to the house and let her out and she sat hunched over for a minute and then started slinking across the kitchen, belly to the floor.
     That first time she was comfortable for only a minute and then loud protesting meows came out of her small body. When I opened the sliding door she darted out and headed for the barn. She found her own way. Over the next few days as the temperature dropped more I brought her in several times. Only now she would follow me to the house from the barn. No need for a carrier. After a while she stopped protesting and was able to explore the rest of the house quietly.
     The day came when it was time for her to come into the house. I set up a wire kennel in the walk-in closet so she would have a relatively small area to observe her suroundingd. I kept a towel over the cage too, for the same reason.
     The first night I kept her in the kennel all night. She quit meowing after a while. In the morning I let the other cats into the room. It was mostly a non-event for Cookie and Lily. They walked by with hardly a notice. But Taffy, the laid back, more social kitty walked up to the kennel and gave it a good sniffing over. No hisses or growls. And then the next thing I saw was Taffy lying down beside the cage. She was Moonbeam’s first friend. I added a nick-name to her, it was Mookie, and since it sounded so much like her old name she responded to it instantly. She had taken the first step well, we would see how the rest would go. And even I was starting to feel better.

Taffy-Ta

Taffy knows who she is. When you see her golden face and eyes surrounded by substantial ruff of soft orange fur you know who she is too; likely descended from the legendary big cats in Africa. Her name, Taffy-Ta denotes her softer side, but her more recent name Tuffy Taffy describes her other side. Because of her early kitten experiences she does not hesitate to use her claws once in a while. Most of the time it has to do with getting her way, more petting, another treat…you know the type. She has long fur but not so that it gets in her way. Her’s is the sort that doesn’t shed. I found out very early on she does not like to be brushed with a shedding brush. I almost always have several little curved claw marks on the back of my hands. She only will tolerate the soft wire brush. Okey Dokey.
She ‘s my conversationalist. Letting me know when she is hungry, upset, scared, wanting some water in her food dish or even some petting. She is not a snuggler, not yet, but she is the one who comes in the house each afternoon for her nap without being coaxed, and then finds the most comfortable chair in the living room after dinner while we read or watch T.V. Her purr sometimes sounds like a croak. Every once in a while I wonder if she has a cat upper respitary thing. She has grown the biggest of my three house cats but she really is a bit of a marshmallow. In the morning she will run around the bed till she is sure Lily, the boss has jumped down. Then if she can she crouches in the shadow and takes a swipe as Lily goes by. She never backs down when Lily hisses at her, she just lays there ignoring her. Ho hum. She gets her morning moments with Mom pretty early, letting me know when the sun is about to come up over the horizon.
Of the three cats she is the one who spends most time in the enclosed outdoor cat yard, mostly at night, catching moths and flies, depending on the season. I hear the click-clack of the cat door in the middle of the night and I know she is in for a while. When she is outside (supervised) she is one busy cat. The other day when she was out in our yard guarding it so that our barn cats could not come into her domain, she flew off the fence where she had been balancing. She was determined to chase Polka Dot out of her yard. Polka Dot had strayed past some unknown boundary known only to Taffy-Ta. She disappeared for a while and I noticed later she was peeking out behind some of the tall grass by the fence, just waiting to pounce, her favorite game.
Lately I’ve tried to entice her to become more of a lap cat by a bit of nose (hers) to finger(mine) touches rewarded by a scrumptious dehydrated chicken strip. It seems to be beginning to work. I got close enough to doctor an abscess that had appeared on her tail the other day. She even has become one of the winners in the nightly, “who gets to sleep with Mom” contest that is played out between her, her sister Cookie-dough and the ‘boss cat’ Lily Lou. Sigh, I hope someday they can all get along.