Twenty-One and Counting (The Lepers, the Tiger and the Powderpuff)

Kimball and Cricket

Kimball and his sister Cricket arrived at our door on the 18th of November with two flats of food, a bag of stove pellets and their own little prison cell. Cricket had an infected eye and they were terrified of everyone and everything. Of course, they escaped from the cage (I think that they had a friend on the inside) and from the bathroom almost as soon as they arrived. All of us want to foster the cute, healthy kittens, and the Tall Lady and I were really no different. We hustled them back into solitary confinement, rubbed Cricket's ointment on her eye, and gave her her oral meds as often as she needed them. I have a small scar on the palm of my right hand shaped like the letter C where Cricket tried to sign her name.

When we found out that they both had ringworm, we asked if they could be moved somewhere else, and I've always felt badly about that. Fortunately, the somewhere else turned out to be a great foster home where these two tiny terrors became pets! They were adopted together and were thriving splendidly the last we heard.

Darcy

We were given another chance, though. Our VOKRA mentor Mickey called us one Saturday morning to ask if we could drive down to the West End to rescue another foster parent from her two horrible kittens! The Tall Lady stayed in the aptly named Escape with the motor running while I went upstairs to see just how bad things were.

I found a small apartment where there was really no place for a kitten to hide, another cage and a handy cat carrier. The plan (such as it was) was to open the door of the kennel and herd the kittens into the carrier. The kittens had other plans however, and they slipped through two different gaps in our trap, and into the specious freedom of the little living room.

Raja

It took us a few minutes, but we caught the tiny, terrified tiger by the scruff of his handsome neck and dropped him into the oubliette, where his pretty little powderpuff of a sister soon followed.

Raja (later Darwin) and Darcy (Dempsey aka Squirrely) were our Christmas kittens. After the initial terror of the move, and braving Bedtroll Brie, they became gen-you-wine pettin' cats, but Raja was always a little more highly-strung and skittish than pretty little Darcy. She was the first to try out the laps, the first to sleep on the big bed, and the first to try to eat a seven-foot prelit Christmas tree.

They were the softest cats we had so far, and two of the prettiest, so it was really no surprise when the couple in North Vancouver with the three nice boys wanted to adopt them both. This time, the Tall Lady and I delivered the kittens to their new home, and it was magnificent! We wanted them to adopt us too.

Their house was everything two small, friendly cats could ever want, and this would be another happy ending - wouldn't it?