Duet for Fiddle and Viola

Chicken Soup for the Soul: What I Learned from the Cat

BY: Elizabeth Creith

When a cat chooses to be friendly, it's a big deal, because a cat is picky.
~Mike Deupree

When you live on a farm, you choose your cats for mousing ability rather than for their cuddlesome qualities.

It's the reason I chose Fiddle, a skinny, green-eyed tortie with long paws and a fearsomely quick pounce.

Of course, I didn't know she was a good hunter when I got her. But her mother was a good mouser, according to my friend Nancy, whose grain storage was mouse-free, so it was worth the risk.

She was cuddly when she was a kitten, round, with soft fur. As she matured, her baby fat melted from her bones and she became a skinny, spooky, predatory cat. She reverted to her cuddly kitten self only when she was pregnant. When the kittens were weaned, she returned to her career as Lurker-in-the-Shadows. My grain storage was mouse-free.

When Fiddle was five years old, I had a run of spontaneous abortion in my ewes. The distressing part was that the ewes miscarried late in the pregnancy. In the middle of the thrill and hustle of lambing, all that new life, my favourite part of the year, came the shock of lamb after lamb emerging from the womb, tiny, perfect and dead. Over half my lambs never drew breath, or had any possibility of it.

Belladonna was one of the last to lamb and, like most of the others, she delivered early. She'd shown no signs of imminent delivery; no triangular hollow in front of the hip to indicate the lamb had dropped into position, no swollen udder, no nesting behaviour. She just pushed out a tiny black lamb, covered with the slime of birth, onto the manure of the barn floor and stood looking at it.

Without hope, I wiped the remains of the sac away from the muzzle and was astonished to hear a little gasp. The tiny thing shook its ears and produced a barely audible bleat. Belladonna strolled away. I tucked the baby, slime and all, into my jacket and headed for the house through the late-March snow.

I kept colostrum in the freezer for just this kind of emergency. While I was feeding the newly-dried lamb her first meal, Fiddle, who must have sneaked into the house on my heels, came creeping across the room and put a tentative paw onto my knee. Before she could pounce, I brushed her off.

"Not a mouse," I said to her, although I could hardly blame her for thinking of the lamb as prey. I could cup it in my hands with the legs dangling through my fingers. On my kitchen scale, it weighed a bare two pounds.

A newborn lamb has to be fed every two hours. A barn full of lambing ewes has to be checked every three or four hours. I was already strained from the lack of uninterrupted sleep. Keeping Fiddle out of the house was impossible; she was not Lurker-in-the-Shadows for nothing. Time and again I found her at my knee as I fed the lamb.
I kept the lamb in a box with a towel and hot-water bottle, in the spare room with the door closed. When I got up at night, I would check first to see if it was worth warming the bottle. I fully expected the lamb to die between one feeding and the next, but she hung on.

Finally the inevitable happened, and I failed to close the door properly when I went to get the bottle. Padding back upstairs in my nightgown, I was shocked to see a wide line of light falling across the hall floor from the guest room.

When I got into the room, I could see that my worst fears were confirmed. Fiddle was in the box with the lamb. From the sharp motion of her head, she was biting. It was probably already too late. I didn't want to look. But I would have to put her out with her prey -- I didn't want blood and guts on my guest room floor.

As I looked down into the box, Fiddle looked up. Her green eyes were slitted and she was purring. Her paws were wrapped around the lamb, who shook her wet, cat-licked ears at me and bleated. At the bleat, Fiddle turned and took the lamb gently by the neck, as I had seen her do with her kittens when they wouldn't hold still for washing. Then she went back to work on the lamb's face and ears.

I waited until she was done, marveling, grateful and sleepily amused. When the lamb was washed to Fiddle's satisfaction, I gave her the bottle and tucked her back in. Fiddle curled around her, purring.

"Two points off your predator license, Fiddle," I whispered, stroking her head. I went back to bed for another snatch of sleep, leaving the guest room door open.

I named the lamb Viola.

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