Or rather, the little tortie we'd been feeding for the last year or so had kittens. The one I had been earnestly hoping was spayed... Oh well.

I came out the door one morning to go to work and two little furballs bolted off the porch in a panic--an orange blur and a white blur. Kittens! We knew we had to do something or we would be watching little kitties get killed by predators, cars or weather--and we weren't going to do that. So we laid low for a week, making our plans. We wanted to be clear how many kittens there were so none would be left without their guardians when we trapped the whole boatload of them and had the parents neutered. I knew enough feline genetics to know there had to be a black one somewhere in the mix.

Turns out, there were two black ones.

The tortie (who I called "Baby" because she was so small and delicate-looking) or her mate (a black shorthair who has been hanging around for a bit longer than her) would bring two or three of the kittens down to eat at quiet times in the morning or evening. Rarely were all of the kittens together at one time.

We rigged the cat run so we could pull the door shut from the kitchen window, blocked the cat door from the shop and took to feeding the strays in the cat pen for several days. Their reflexes were so good that it was hard to get the jump on them. Our first attempt netted only the dirty-looking white kitten. He spent a rather miserable night and day alone in the big cage in the spare bedroom, hunched in a carrier and scared spitless. I felt so sorry for the little guy...

Luckily, he wasn't alone for long. The next evening, we caught the remaining three kittens and no sooner did we have them inside the big cage than their parents came looking for them, so we caught them as well. Baby turned out to be very much a tame cat--within five minutes of being caught, she was purring and rubbing against us. Daddy was an entirely different story--he wanted nothing to do with humans and would spit and lunge at me whenever I came near his cage. We got him neutered and let him loose back into our yard. He stays nearby and eats on the porch but is not interested in having any kind of a relationship with people.

Baby, after her surgery, ended up going to Cold Bay where Denny had found her a home with friends. Denny and I handled the kittens to the point where they would tolerate it, then I took them to the Animal Shelter. After two weeks, the red and the black boys went to the Shelter on Kodiak Island, where they found new homes. But the little black female wasn't growing as fast as her brothers, so I brought her back home so I could keep an eye on her health. Turns out she was plenty healthy, just very small. After a few days, I brought her brother home as well--he was so scared that it didn't seem right to leave him all by himself at the Animal Shelter. If nothing else, he could be company for his sister.

And they are still here.

And, to our surprise, in October of 2005, their daddy, the black cat we call Bart, decided to move in with us, too. It would seem he wasn't as unreformably feral as we thought. In fact, he has turned out to be so friendly, it is hard to believe he is the same cat who spent a miserable week or so with us in late 2003. The winter of 2005 passed more easily for us since we didn't have to worry if the "feral black cat" was able to find shelter and keep warm in the worst weather. He was--in fact--sleeping on our bed...