Billy, Part 2

Suspicious that there might be a second cat under the house, I reset the trap Sunday morning.

Last night, I climbed into bed beside a sleeping Marie and closed my eyes. I was quickly headed down and out. But I got brought back up by a thump that I thought came from the furnace duct. I sat up and waited.

A moment later I heard a faint meowing, and I knew there was a second cat. I got up, put on pants, shoes and a sweater, grabbed a flashlight and headed for the basement.

When I opened the door from the basement into the crawl space, I found the trap empty, except for the undisturbed cat food bait; the entrance gate was still open. "Shit," I thought, "a smart one." I figured he'd avoided the trap, either because he'd seen the other cat in it, or because he was kept away by the still strong scent of cat piss.

But when I shone the flashlight into the deeper recesses of the crawl space, there he was -- Billy -- looking right at me. I took the light out of his eyes and called to him, and he came right out. He stopped to rub against my legs and chat with me and, once I'd closed the door to the crawl space, he did the "Billy stand": rising up on his back legs to invite my hand to his head, then standing as high as he can to intensify his pleasure. And mine.

I let him out of the basement, but he hung around, waiting for a handout. So I gave him a small bowl of kitty chow. That was probably a bad idea, because he's a well-known mooch throughout this part of the neighborhood, but I was so damned glad to see him clean and sleek and healthy and happy.

Welcome back, Billy!

Billy

Awful experience first thing this morning.

I'd closed up a hole in the foundation. Some animal (I suspected a cat) had dug through so it could get into the basement. It had to be fairly recent, as we only finished the renovation of our back porch 3-4 months ago, and George, Tom and I had all checked out every square inch of the outside of the house several times. (They'd done a number of small repairs.)

I worried that I might have trapped some animal under there -- probably Billy, because I knew he doesn't sleep in Tommy's house at night -- particularly after I heard a caterwaul only a few hours after placing the trap. I was sure it was coming from under the house, and Sweetpea ran to one of the furnace ducts...

So I borrowed a trap from Atlanta Pet Rescue (from which we'd gotten Wally and Lumpy), baited it and put it into the crawl space. There was still no sign of activity when I checked after dinner last night.

But this morning, when I opened the door between the basement and the crawl space, I was met by a jumping cage and violent spitting. I thought for a moment it was a raccoon, but it was Billy.

We'd gotten acquainted with Billy very slowly over the years. He's one of the nine (I think) cats that Tom (and Diane, before she died) kept. 

Skid lived on our porch, convinced it was his. He was old and filthy, but sweet.  Though Sebastian tried to befriend him, Skid would back away when Sebastian came out. One morning, Tom found Skid's body on the walkway I'd put in between our sidewalk and the driveway.

Felton wanted to live on our porch, but Skid wouldn't let him. But he would stroll along the path to our water faucet, haughty, wary of me. He'd then wander back home, or on to Carolyn's house, often stopping to spray our steps or one of our bushes before he moved on. I put a bowl under the faucet and kept it filled for him – I've never known a cat who drank so much water. For over a year he wouldn't let me touch him, even though I would rinse out and re-fill the bowl each time we met; he'd wait until I moved away, then stroll over and take a deep draught. Gradually we became friends, on his terms. After many months, when I'd come out, he would deign to roll around happily on the sidewalk, just out of reach, but move away if I got too close. Finally I got to touch him, but I would have to work my way slowly over to where he was lolling. After Skid died, he began sleeping on the wicker couch on our porch and, to demonstrate his approval of our relationship, he stopped spraying the plants and the steps; now he sprays the porch right in front of the door. For the past year or two, he has been meeting me on the steps, and he's become downright affectionate. 

Billy was a cute and very rambunctious nearly-full-grown cat when we first met him. He'd hide in the bushes and play with a stick or leaves, just out of reach. Tommy told us that he'd use the cat door to get food, but he spent more and more time outdoors, apparently intimidated or abused by the other cats. I coaxed and coaxed, and I was finally able to get him to come and rub against my legs as I sat on the steps. At first he wouldn't let me touch him -- I'd get a swipe and a slash if I tried. Later he let me pet him some, but he remained skitterish, prone to a wild-eyed look and a swipe. His preferred mode was to drop down on a stair or the sidewalk beyond my reach, roll around passionately for a while, then come and rub against my legs, maybe get a few strokes, then retreat to a lower step or the sidewalk, just out of reach, and resume his rolling. Two or three iterations of this, and he'd take flight.

This morning's Billy was a completely different animal, violent, aggressive, and clearly terrified. He scared the hell out of me. I'd never seen any creature acting like that. The cage contained only fragments of the styrofoam bowl into which I'd put the bait, along with pieces of the plastic sheet that used to line the cellar floor below the cage, which he'd shredded. There was the awful stench of cat piss over everything.

After putting on a glove for protection (even though the mesh of the cage was fine enough to prevent him reaching out), I carried the cage out on to the back stoop. He was hissing and thrashing about the whole time. When I opened the trap door, he took off across the yard and disappeared.

Poor Billy. I'd not seen him since the last warm days of fall, and I'm sure this experience has rendered him completely feral. I'm sure he'll never come calling again...

Wally and Lumpy

Jesus! The herd is growing out of control!

Last Saturday, after ordering a 90-inch long table for the back porch and after tacos at Taquería del Sol, we stopped to inspect a doggie day care place, thinking it might be good for Sweetpea to spend a day a week in the company of dogs. We never got inside, because Atlanta Pet Rescue is right next door. We'd agreed when Sebastian died that we'd love to get two cats someday -- someday -- but not until we'd slowed down on travel a bit. (Two so they could keep each other company.) Sweetpea is lonely, so, more recently, we'd been planning on getting a cat -- one cat -- to keep her company.

But I got the impulse to look at kittens. Must have been the margarita. I knew when we went in that we'd come out with two. Now we're knee-deep in cat litter, and President Obama doesn't have to worry about the economy, because our bailout plan for PetSmart has driven their stock price up significantly in the past few days.

Now the first task of the morning and the last of the evening are milking, gathering eggs, slopping, walking, loving, feeding, and cleaning up poop. I took Sweetpea out for a long walk this morning. As I collected her morning treasures in a plastic bag, I pointed out to her that I don't even take my wife out for a walk before my own breakfast...

I had a dream a few nights ago in which the western wall of our dining room was solid sheetrock, rather than windows, and there were two or three long, weeping stains on the wall, where water was somehow getting in and dripping down the wall. Night before last the dream came back, but the water was flooding out of long horizontal cracks, pulling chunks of sheetrock off and showing lathe underneath. In an instant the water went from covering a few square feet of the floor to running over it to a depth of a couple of inches. There was a Mexican workman in the other room, and I started yelling to him for help. I could hear him laughing as I kept yelling, "Do something! Do something! What should we do???" Through his laughter he said, "Turn the water off!" I had to think hard to remember that the key for turning off the master water valve at the street is propped up against the wall in the basement, in a designated and easy-to-find place.

Jesus! What are we doing???