A Cat Conundrum

My first Knit & Nibble mystery, MURDER, SHE KNIT, opened with my amateur-sleuth protagonist, Pamela Paterson, wondering what had become of the skittish stray kitten she had been feeding. As it happened, the kitten had not vanished for good, and its eventual willingness to be adopted figures as a subplot in that book.

The skittish stray kitten theme was inspired by a real-life experience. One cold and wet winter night we discovered a tiny, shivering black kitten on our front porch. It absolutely would not let us approach it, but it was very willing to accept food. I think we gave it some canned tuna that first night. When it came back the next morning, we gave it more canned tuna, and then I made a trip to the market for cat food.

Every morning and every evening, we’d glimpse it through the window in our front door, waiting and waiting. The instant the door opened, it would vanish, but we’d set out a bowl of food and close the door and it would come creeping back and devour the bowl’s contents. We came to enjoy this ritual and even gave the kitten a name inspired by its color: Mel, from the ancient Greek word for “black.”

We would very happily have adopted Mel, but unlike the fate I envisioned for the stray kitten in MURDER, SHE KNIT, Mel refused to let us befriend it and eventually one day stopped showing up for food. We hoped against hope that someone else had managed to coax it indoors and that it was now well-fed, warm, and sleek in another household, but we will never know.

Now another stray has come into our lives. We first became aware that we had a visitor when we noticed that a handsome cat, part white, part tabby-gray, and nearly full-grown, had begun lounging in our yard. It was summer, so the spectacle wasn’t sad, like the sight of a wet kitten on a cold night.

The visitor seemed to particularly favor one plant, rubbing itself against the leaves and seeming to go into ecstasy, and we concluded it was somebody’s pet allowed to roam a bit on nice days. (People do this, though I know it’s frowned upon.) We decided the plant must be related to catnip and we started calling the cat “Catnippy,” “Nippy” for short.

After several days of these sightings, Nippy began appearing on our deck from time to time, quite visible through the window in the back door and the screen door that opens from a screened porch to the deck beyond.

One day my husband said, “I think it looks hungry.” We still had some cans of cat food left from when we were feeding Mel and so my husband put some in a dish and stepped out onto the deck, at which point Nippy vanished. He put the dish down and retreated to the screened porch, and Nippy reappeared and ate the food with great enthusiasm.

Now we have a new ritual. Nippy shows up on the deck at dawn—I know this because if I wake up extra early and look out the upstairs window, I see a patch of white and gray fur down below. My husband sets out a dish of cat food at about eight. As soon as he opens the screen door, Nippy retreats to watch warily from halfway down the steps, only coming back up once my husband steps back through the screen door and closes it behind him.

Every evening, Nippy reappears—sometimes the tips of its ears visible above the bottom frame of the screen door are the only sign of its presence—and we give it a handful of dry kibble.

For a while, it spent most days lounging on the deck, moving from one side to the other as the shade moved. On particularly hot days, it would curl around one or another of my terra cotta flower pots. I keep the plants in them well watered and imagine that the terra cotta feels pleasantly cool.

Lately, however, we haven’t seen Nippy on the deck at all, but if I open the back door to step onto the screened porch for some reason, it often pops up the steps onto the deck, expecting an extra treat, probably.

We would gladly adopt Nippy, but we’re making no progress at all towards domestication. It must have been born to a feral cat, and how it came to survive to near adulthood and end up in our yard is a mystery. I’ve read that once a cat grows to adulthood it’s almost impossible to reverse the effects of growing up feral.

There was a spell of very rainy weather last week and we felt so sad to see Nippy braving the rain in order to show up for meals, though at least there are plenty of enclosed areas, like the space under our front porch, to shelter when it’s not dinner time.

Now that it’s getting on toward fall, though, the weather will get colder and wetter, and I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps an adoption is in our future, if we are patient and lucky.