Small Things: Princesses and Pirates

(This is a story I wrote in November 2008)

I was shop-vac-ing my “Princess Cat Parlour” – I’ll explain what this is shortly – when I heard a “thwop” following by the bagpipey noise that indicates, “In four hours the ship blows up, Captain.”

I turned the vac off, and found the plug midway up the wand – where two lengths are joined. I separated them and “plip,” out fell ... a dead mouse. A rather well-fed dead mouse.

I think it must have died of old age.

You may be wondering how a mouse can die of old age when it lives in a room full of cats. Let me explain. I volunteer for the area pound and am always bringing home adult cats to foster (and often to have fixed).

The ones that are housecats – that never want to touch their tender tootsies on the turf outside, let alone tarnish their toes and tongue with dead mouse tidbits – they are the Princesses.

The Princesses get names like “Sweetie Pie” and “Halo.” I heat their room to a nice 68 F; they have really comfy beds; and CBC Two (classical) playing in the background. They do very well in family homes.

The “Pirates” are the big old smelly tom cats or the scrappy, skinny female cats.

All they’ve known is sleeping under the stars, scavenging, spraying and fighting. The Pirates get names like “Jack” and “Growl.”

I don’t heat the “Pirates Shipyard” as warm because they are going to be moving to farm homes (barns) where they can swashbuckle to their hearts’ content. They only get mats to sleep on and CBC One (talk radio) to keeping them company. (For some reason I can’t get “Two” in that room.)

But funnily enough, within a week, my kings and queens of the road migrate to the sitting room; my Pirates become Princesses.

And the mouse got to chow down on cat food and die in its sleep.

How are they able to meander on over? It happened by chance. The rooms are side-by-each. The Princess’ Parlour has a drop ceiling; the Pirates’ Shipyard doesn’t have a ceiling, but the space above the Parlour ceiling was nice and cozy. It was bound to happen – one day a few of them congregated in the same spot and fell through.

My hubby patched the hole with a board. Then they fell through just to the left of that spot – and my hubby patched that up too. And then they fell through to the right of the first spot and my hubby said, “What’s the point?”

I try to lure the Pirates back to Shipyard. At suppertime I always serve them their canned food first. When they hear me open “their” door, the rapscallions scramble to see who will get out of the Parlour first. These cats – male or female - can jump from the floor to one of the holes in the ceiling using pretty much any prop. The Princesses – male or female - can’t.

But they don’t stay there, no way. The minute their bowls are licked clean they evacuate to the Parlour and finish off the Princess’ food. And speaking of evacuate – they only use the litter boxes in the Parlour, never in the Shipyard.

So why don’t I make more of an effort to keep them separate? First of all, I am only fostering. This is not a permanent situation, in any event. Plus there is something quite charming about a cat who decides that s/he’d rather switch than fight.

Warmth, comfort and classical music have a stronger pull than rain, garbage cans and barking dogs. But the Pirates still get adopted out as farm cats – except I will only adopt them out to a place where there is a very warm barn and all the food they can eat.

“And Saturday afternoons,” I say to the new owners, “if you don’t mind, please change the radio channel in the barn to CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.”

These grimalkins like both the operatic music and the host Bill Richardson. It seems he’s a cat lover. His most recent bio says:

Richardson lives in Vancouver with "two small dogs, a mean black cat, and a harp on which he can play one tune." The tune proves to be Greensleeves and the cat isn't nearly as mean as the bio implies.

"I feel badly about that," Richardson says about slagging the cat. "She must have been being a b*tch the day I wrote it. But, for the most part, she's a very nice cat."

Perhaps Bill would like to adopt both a Pirate and a Princess to join his mean/nice cat. This way he can match either of her moods!

Jan Carrie Steven is a volunteer with Cat Adoption Trust Sudbury (CATS) and the co-ordinator of Small Things: Kitty Boutique and Cat Adoptions. For more information, go to www.smallthings.ca.