Shoving the can of “whitefish pate” into the trap, I closed the door. Sam came outside, “You’re not going to use a whole can are you?”
“Yes, I am,” I answered, “I want to be sure to get him.”
I was trapping again; this time a feral cat. I can’t even count the number of feral cats that have shown up at the Prairie house. I’m thinking it’s because of our regular feeding habit. At the Bardwell’s, the cats and everybody else get a regular feeding, including snacks.
The wild cats seem to like the regularity but they can’t be tolerated because they threaten our two old neutered males. Yes, Jane is male but that’s another story. If not threatened, then Jane and Jack sit there on the porch railing wild-eyed and watch the interlopers eat their daily provisions. There are also the birds the strays consume, the very birds we are watching, feeding, photographing and enjoying.
One of the strays looked like Jane and for a while I was bumfuzzled by the look-alikes, until I saw them looking at each other and snapped a picture through the window. They were a mirror image.
“We’ve got another cat,” I told Sam and showed him evidence of the Jane look-alike. I retrieved the trap from the boat shed, picked off the dirt dauber nests, and set up the critter-trapping business again.
Cats are harder to trap than possums and raccoons; they are much more wary. We tried letting a few hang around and even named some, like “Bo-kitty,” also called “Roll-over-kitty” because the cat would roll over on command like a dog. We got real attached, then he left. I can’t for the life of me understand why a cat getting whitefish paté every day would leave.
Sam suggested, “Girl cats.”
Then there was Stratos; he was living in the boat, thus the name. Once a workman accidentally left a door open and Strat, a wild Prairie cat, was found upstairs in our bed. Strat also left us high and dry. Girl cats.
No more naming strays, keeping them around, getting attached and letting them upset our own Jane and Jack, so now I trap ’em and move ’em on.
The whole can of cat food worked like a charm. The slamming of the trap door didn’t wake me that night on account of Nyquil, but in any case the next morning Sam announced, “You got ’em.”
Then, into the Bardwell relocation program: The cat has got go far enough away so he won’t find his way back. I thought about downtown behind a restaurant but he’s a Prairie cat and I don’t think he’d like being in town much. And then there’s the airport but there’s all that coming and going.
We’ll find a place, and you never know — it could be a neighborhood near you.
Shannon Rule Bardwell is a Southern writer living quietly in the Prairie. Her email is [email protected].
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