The Arrival of our Barn Cats

A few days ago, I brought six cats to Emotive Acres.  Following up on a classified ad in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, I’d found a lovely young tortiseshell kitty who came with five nursing kittens in tow.  The mama had been a stray in the suburban village of Troy, Illinois.  Despite growing skinny as she fattened up her five little furballs, she was extremely healthy and happy, thanks to her generous rescuers.  Our barn needed barn cats; we’ve taken to stabling up our horses each night for their “bedtime ritual,” so it was more imperative than ever that we employ a force of working felines to keep the area bug and rodent free.  Sweetie’s resume in the Post Dispatch was perfect.  As a stray, we could trust that she was already a trained and successful hunter.  As a mom, she had an army of five behind her, learning from her, ready to divide, conquer, and protect our sixteen acres from any vermin unfortunate enough to cross a kitty’s path.  And, secretly, I’ve always wanted a tortiseshell.

Our first night didn’t exactly go as I’d hoped.  It took almost two hours to get the kitties home, and by that time Sweetie’s anxiety had gone through the roof.  She had squished herself between my truck’s window and the box that held her kittens, and she was panting like she’d just run a marathon.  Though we tried to be guarded as we transported the wee ones into their deluxe new hayloft apartment, Sweetie managed to escape in a burst of freedom that only a frightened stray could muster.  No sooner had I placed the first fluffy black bundle in the kennel, than Sweetie had disappeared into the rolling hills of the Ozarks.  My stomach sank.  Mama cat was gone, and now I had five fuzzy faces, ten tiny blue eyes, looking up at me in expectation of full nipples and sweet milk.  I couldn’t believe Sweetie had left her babies.  I’d rather she’d stayed and hissed and fought me for them.  I wasn’t expecting to take on five orphans while the paint was still drying on Emotive Acres’s office walls.

But this is a farm.   More often than we encounter death on our property, we encounter birth and life.  Each new baby is our new baby.  The kittens are as much mine as they are Sweetie’s.  They are also my husband’s and my children’s, my dogs’ and my horses’.  Each new foal belongs to the land; each new calf belongs to the land’s inhabitants.  In turn, I must recognize that my children belong to the land, too.   They are no longer just mine and my husband’s; they belong to our horses, our fish, our cows and our cats.    On Emotive Acres, each living creature, each blade of grass, exists to serve others.  Some creatures will live longer than others, some will require more training than others.  On this land, there is no deflection of responsibility.  All responsibility is joy, and so we tend to each other in peace and happiness.  So when a mama leaves her young for any reason on this land, she can do so with the confidence that they will be cared for as she would care for them.

Thank God for Google. I managed to make it through the night on some all-species milk from the feed store and some moistened cat food.  I was forced to lock the kittens in their kennel that night, to ensure that no sneaky creature would slip in and help itself to a tasty tabby treat.  I left a bowl of cat food out for Sweetie, hoping that she would return.  And she did.  The next day, we found her moaning at Sampson from behind the kennel, dismayed that she could not find her way in.  It took some coaxing (and a lot of chin scratching) for Sweetie to get her bearings in her new home, but now she is as residential as any who have ever called or will ever call Emotive Acres home.  I was overjoyed to see Sweetie return.  We’d operated on faith, she and I, and we both arrived at the same place: we refused to be forced, coerced or tied down.  We chose Emotive Acres, and Emotive Acres chose us.