I share my house with three American shorthair mogs (Tink - brown mackerel tabby; Punk/Doodle - tortie-and-white; Gord - red mackerel tabby) and of course my husband, Tony. I also volunteer several hours a week at a stray shelter, which I've written about here before. Anybody who does this or has done it knows that all cats are beautiful and unique, even when you're dealing with twenty or thirty of them at once, but there will always be those with whom you connect more than the rest.

Right now, there are two I want to tell you about. The first one came in curled up in a ball, shivering, smelling of garbage and possible skunk. He was dubbed Stinky Pete at first, because he, well, stank loudly, though now we mostly just call him Pete. If you think I'm going to say it was a cute little kitten, hope you're not disappointed to hear it was a fifteen-pound bobtailed male, about four years old. He was so scared he wouldn't respond to anybody at the shelter when he first came in, so one of the 'difficult case' fosters took him home for a while. Even when he came back, though, he still spent most of his time huddled in his basket in the bottom of the cage, glaring up at everyone as if he knew they were hiding a thermometer behind their backs with 'where Pete's sun doesn't shine' engraved on it. He wasn't hateful or aggressive -- simply distrustful. Personally, I think maybe he has some Manx in him, since I've heard they become very attached to their owners and are traumatized when they're left behind. Nobody argued with me when I suggested he acted as much like he had a broken heart as anything else -- it's an apt description of the poor guy's behavior, at first.

See, most cats come into the shelter scared, their pupils so wide their eyes look black. I know cats hate change, and having your family abandon you has to be horrible. Most of them come around after a couple of days of regular food and friendly voices, though. Pete didn't. For two weeks, though you could pet him and he'd purr, he wouldn't get out of his basket other than to eat and poop.

Because he's a big, muscular cat, and looks so wild, a lot of people seemed hesitant to socialize with him. To look at Pete, you'd think he could take your arm off up to the elbow in one bite -- he's built like a buck stove, has jowls like a Scottish wildcat. His mouth is big, his fangs are long, his paws are enormous and his claws are almost as thick as dog claws. He doesn't look like a domestic cat, he looks like some kind of wild thing. Some of us dig that, though, so we sat on the floor next to the cage and rubbed and tickled until he started rolling over in the basket and looking us in the eye. Not much later, he went into the display room and he hasn't looked back since.

Now, Pete loves nothing more than to curl up in the cage or on a cat tree with his head on your shoulder, lick your chin and purr. And purr, and purr, and purr. He'll even let you rub his belly, if he likes you. And even though he's never met any of you, I'm pretty sure he likes you. He likes everybody, so far. I guess I feel more of a bond with Pete than with some of the others precisely because he was a 'hard case' -- several of us took extra time to force our attentions on Pete because deep down, we knew there was a pretty good cat in there, and we were afraid he'd end up at the public shelter with extremely low odds of lasting more than a week if we didn't, to make room for cats that could be adoptable. I can understand why somebody might be hesitant about Pete because of his looks, but I'm confident someone will eventually take him home. We're all incredibly glad we didn't let that rugged, wild-looking exterior fool us.

And then, there's Stella. When I think of phrases like 'cute as a button,' or 'butter wouldn't melt in her mouth,' I see Stella's little square face, radar dish ears and round green eyes. She's a little brown cat who's colored like an Abyssinian -- stripes on her legs and her face, but brown tipped with black on her back -- and with a few pale ginger patches spread around on her feet, face and sides. She's about a year old, and I doubt she weighs seven and a half pounds. She's one of those cats whose face is made so once in a while, you'd swear you saw her smiling. She has a whole vocabulary coiled up in her tail -- she twists it in a corkscrew, quirks it in a question mark, waves it in your face. I'd bring her home, but she's so much like my Doodle, it would ruin Doodle with jealousy. I'm sure both girls think they're unique, and I can't bring myself to burst anybody's bubble. I guess that's why I'm so fond of Stella, though -- because she reminds me of the cat in my own home I feel most bonded with. She'll make somebody a terrific companion, if they understand what she's about.

Copyright © Melinda Nowikowski
October 24, 2001