When I got my first teaching  job, I had to move from my fifteen acre wooded retreat.  This was something of a problem because I had three dogs and seven cats at the time.  Since I was working on the backside of beyond, rental places weren’t all that plentiful anyway; and finding one I could afford that would take pets was pretty well impossible.

To fix this problem, I purchased a mobile home for $4800, which I thought was a pretty good bargain.  I figured I could move it with me when I changed positions or whatever; my naivete about mobile home living will be covered in a different story.  This one is about the one of the three kittens who were already in residence in my newly purchased used manse.

One night, shortly after moving in, both my dogs and cats started raising a raucous.  Sure they were killing each other, my husband and I (Yes, this was while I was still married to husband number three–and that’s a whole ‘nother story.  Not sure I’ll ever have the courage to tell that one.) dashed in.  We didn’t see anything, and no one seemed to be missing fur.

This performance was repeated for a couple of nights, and on about the third night I caught sight of something gray making a mad dash for the bathroom.  A family of kittens were living under the trailer, and entering it through a hole in the bathroom floor.  The hole was too small for my adult cats to go out through it, but it made a dandy entrance way for these wild babies.

I asked around to see if they belonged to anyone; the trailer park owner said that people had a habit of dumping litters of kittens in the park, and that he usually set live traps for them and took them over to the national forest nearby.  I borrowed a live trap, and was able to catch one of the babies.  I put an old wire chicken coop that I had used to move my cats (this was before I was able to afford good cat carriers) in the living room, and decanted the hissing, spitting little beauty into it.  After one was caught, the others steered clear of the trap, no matter what sort of enticing food we put in it.  They still came into the trailer, however, to visit the cat food dish and to visit their sister.  One night, I managed to get the door to the bathroom closed before they could get back to it, and after a wild chase, captured two more–getting bitten in the process.  I think there was a fourth because I heard something running away from the trailer.  But it never returned.

For several weeks, the kittens lived in their cage.  They calmed down enough that I could feed, water, and change their litter without losing one or getting bitten.  I named them Shadow, Troublesome and Bashful.  Shadow was the boldest.  She was a solid blue Maltese color with a white bell, a dainty trim beauty who was all attitude.  Troublesome pestered her sisters, tried to pounce my hand when I was changing their litter and bedding, and generally earned her name.  Bashful cowered in the back of the cage, hissing and spitting at everyone and everything.

When I came home one night, my ex had let the kittens out in the trailer.  Why he did this, I will never know.  He didn’t seem to have any sort of explanation.  They were growing, and the cage was beginning to be confining; perhaps he did it in some sense of misguided humanity.  But the babies really weren’t ready to be a part of our general pet population.  Wild as they were, I could not catch them to return them to the coop.

I lived in that same spot for another year; the husband went.  The cats stayed.  One of my dogs got heartworms, and I had to keep him kenneled as part of his medical regime.  He was a dobey-shepard mix, and so strong he tore up two dog cages (which could not have been restful.)  I began tethering him to the couch so that he would not eat everything in the trailer while I was at work.  I was a little slow coming home one night.  When I arrived, he had climbed up the back of the couch and launched himself out the window, hanging himself by his lead and collar.  Had I not already planned to move, I think that would have finished my stay at that location.