Cat Tales: The Ballad Of Attack Kitty

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keep your head to the sky

Ed: Welcome to Cat Tales, where I tell the stories of my feral-feline colony in northern Ohio. If you’re looking for heartbreaking tales of multi-generational struggle, bitter resentments that transcend time or space, and sporadic joy that breaks through despair at the last possible moment… go read Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. This is just about cats — jb

Death by iron. Five kittens gone. The whole litter, crushed beneath a rust-streaked construction dumpster and therefore beyond her ability to clean or even see the limp, paperback-book-sized bodies. Mama Kitty was a pure-looking-if-not-pure-bred Russian Blue, turned out by brutish and low-class neighbors when nobody wanted to buy her kittens and getting her spayed would have been a waste of cigarette money. They let their dog chase her off the property. She went north to our acreage, already pregnant again. The cool, damp area hollowed out beneath the dumpster must have seemed perfect to instincts created before the dawn of history. In the summer of 2022 she delivered two tigers and a grey/white girl there, nursed them, hunted on their behalf, kept the raccoons off. The loss of her next litter in the spring of 2023, when a construction vehicle struck and moved the dumpster a critical few inches, must have seemed the casually violent act of an an uncaring god.

And the cruelest fact: the deaths brought her back into heat. In short order she was caught and bred once more. Thankfully, the construction dumpster was gone by then. She found a barn with cool concrete floors and a roof to intercede between her and the rain. So she delivered her next litter in the woods, but once their eyes were open she brought them over that threshold and out of the weather, to a discarded cardboard box marked “Hoosier R35B”.

there’s an ass for every seat

Again, she delivered five healthy children. One jet-black girl, also the runt of the litter. A black boy, broad and agile. Then three tiger brothers, replicas of the father who wouldn’t leave her alone and who still watched her from a new gravel driveway beyond the barn door.

Danger Girl and I heard, then found, them in the cardboard box. I felt they could be handled and socialized. Maybe four weeks old, and the personalities already distinct; it makes you think about children and their destinies just a bit. What to do with them? Giving them serious names would make no sense with ferals who would absolutely not be living in our house. So: Sister Kitty, because she was the only girl. Grover, the dignified black male, because my son had just learned to play “Mister Magic”. The brown-furred tiger looked perpetually dusty, so… Dusty. One silverish tiger who couldn’t make much noise, so he was Broken Meower. Finally, the silver tiger with the solid black patch on his head. Resembled his father more than the others. He was the one who was always instigating something, biting his siblings, stalking your shoelace. Therefore, he was Attack Kitty, or AK for short.

for him, the action *is* the friskies

In the summer evenings last year, once the house was built and we’d moved in, Danger Girl and I would sit in the barn and play with the cats, feed them, talk to them. Mom took them hunting. They were eerily adept at eating the best organs out of a mouse, like little Hannibal Lecters. The tiger boys moved and played as a unit. Dusty was the most affectionate, to us and to his siblings, while Sister Kitty early on developed a habit of slapping and biting anyone who came near her share of the food. Grover stood apart from the other four, as if he knew something they didn’t.

One morning Danger Girl ran in the house holding back sobs: The garage door was closing and AK ran under it, he got hit by it, he’s dying. I found him stretched out immobile on the ground, mouth open and tongue hanging out. He’d voided his bowels, one sad little lump behind him. His body no bigger than my outstretched hand. I realized that we needed a veterinarian. Like now. Started calling around. Out here the vets mostly focus on livestock and horses. Or they’re not taking new patients. A clinic in the poorer part of Mansfield picked up on the tenth ring and told us to come over. When we got there it was a dingy room with Seventies-style wood paneling and a few tired benches. The receptionist was matter of fact. “Why is the cat called AK? Like the gun or something?”

“Sure.” I could already tell we were wasting money and time. Except we weren’t, not at all. The vet, when she arrived, was a lovely and empathetic woman of a certain age. Very soothing. And the bearer of good news.

“We did an X-ray. He’s got a little fracture in his neck. You’ll need to keep him indoors for maybe a month, to let that heal, so he isn’t killed tussling with his brothers.” And just like that, Reader, we had an indoor cat. For a while, anyway.

AK adjusted to air-conditioned life the way some women adjust to five-star hotels: with obvious gratitude but also a certainty that they deserve the very best. He was impeccably clean, always playful. In the evening he would mew at the door for his two brothers, and they, in turn, would bump heads against it from the other side. There was no choice but to permit supervised playdates from the third week on.

By the fifth week it was obvious that what we actually had were three indoor/outdoor cats. They came and went as they liked, sleeping on beds and couches during the day then rushing out to the treeline at night. Dusty was the best hunter by far, securing a wide variety of field mice and chipmunks. Broken Meower got (most of) his voice back but remained the shy and retiring one, sleeping far more than the other two.

They were sizable by the fall. Fast and fit, a joy to watch even in the unconscious cruelty they showed to prey before completing the kill and tossing the dead body between themselves. AK did not like any situation where he was not the center of attention, quickly destroying the screen outside my office because climbing it was the easiest way to ensure I would immediately let him in the house. His sister took a turn as a full-time inmate after her spaying, and AK would demand to check up on her, rubbing his head against hers and licking her face clean.

Most of the time, the three tiger boys had the run of the yard, while Grover preferred to relax in the barn beneath the Radicals on their stands. As Carlito Brigante liked to say, however, the street is watching. We started noticing adult ferals from the surrounding area at mealtime, most notably a battered tuxedo cat with frostbitten ears and torn-off tail, whom I named Heckler, and his sleeker, faster brother, yclept Koch. They always yielded to AK’s aggression, because if they didn’t the other two tigers would sprint through the long grass and back his play. So for a while there was peace on the yard, so to speak. Then the first chills of winter came, and with them a pair of stronger adversaries.

The first was a black-and-white cat with pink nose and visible skin showing through the white fur of his face. I named him Albino Kitty. He had a permanent hangdog expression, but he was big and broad-shouldered. The first time he challenged AK, he was driven off with a bloody face and permanent scars on his nose and chin. Problem solved. But two weeks later, my little tiger was limping when he came for breakfast. It was a Saturday morning. Our reassuring rural vet was unavailable. I took him to the Ohio State emergency vet, thinking AK had broken a front paw. It was a beautiful facility and we didn’t have to wait ten minutes.

“Something bit him really hard,” the teenaged vet-to-be told me shortly afterwards, “so we put him under, drained the abscess, sewed him up, and bandaged him.”

“Thank God,” I replied.

“The bill will be $557.” Between the first incident, this one, and the neutering, this was now a thousand-dollar “feral” cat who had also done $400 worth of harm to my window screens. From his warm perch inside the house, AK licked his injured paw and hissed through the window at his returned adversary, Albino Kitty, who was now sporting a set of long, bloody wounds to his face and neck in addition to a permanently half-closed left eye. Had I been able to catch Albino, I’d have taken him to OSU, as well. No playing favorites, every cat the light touches is mine — but he was too wary of people for it to be possible.

With AK hors de combat, Dusty and Broken Meower were afraid to challenge Albino, who became entirely too comfortable on our front porch… but around that time was when AK’s father, Tiger Dad, returned from his mysterious sabbatical and decided to start attending the meals.

Cats aren’t dogs; they don’t maintain a hierarchy and they don’t devote much of their brain to social matters. But you wouldn’t need much grey matter to know that Tiger Dad was the OG of this square mile. We saw his children by other moms sprinting across farm fields or loitering in the sun, both to the north and south of us. The coyotes and raccoons held no terror for him. The other adult ferals he treated with the detached contempt of a Sun King, swatting at them then stretching out in satisfaction when they ran.

Mama Kitty, who had disappeared for months and consequently had missed out on neutering, returned as well, and was discovered in the garage with five new kittens, two of which were female tigers. Tiger Dad pranced around the property in celebration while Albino watched from a distance. Too much dignity to run from me, but somehow TD was never close enough to catch for neutering. Not that I fancied my chances of getting him into a travel crate. You’d have better luck with a young bobcat.

It was almost time for AK to return to the outdoors. I sat with him on the step and let him sniff the air a bit, knowing he wouldn’t run for the trees just yet. “Listen,” I told him. “You and I are not that different. We’ve broken our necks doing stupid stuff. We like a scrap, but we don’t always come out unscathed. And we have these old fathers hanging around, being all menacing and stuff, long past their sell-by date in my opinion, really. I feel for you. But know this: you’re on two strikes, like Ving Rhames in Baby Boy. If I have to take you to the vet again, you’re gonna be an indoor cat from now on. So think about what you do next.” Then I kissed him multiple times directly on the face and called him the prettiest boy ever, which he hates.

This winter dragged on, snowing through March. The three tigers slept in heated cat houses outside the front door. Grover had a similar setup in the barn, as did Mama Kitty. Many of the older ferals had departed for somewhere else, including both Heckler and Koch, who either found a new territory or simply died in the cold. Albino reappeared, and started mating with the kittens. Whenever AK saw him doing it, he would rush headlong towards his much larger opponent, breathing fire to interrupt the rape of his younger sisters — but surely he wasn’t interrupting every meet-up this way.

“Oh, they’re too young, and nothing will come of it,” I said, ignorantly. One afternoon I was in my office when I heard hissing and yowling. Looking out, I saw Tiger Dad out in the clover, surrounded by his three boys. Dusty and Broken Meower had flank positions, but it was AK in his face. “He’s your father!” I yelled. “He’s just trying to be in your life! Give him a chance.” AK ignored my therapy-sounding, candy-assed advice, and took a combative step forward: let’s go, old man. Tiger Dad evaluated the situation with the same dead-eyed look he gave everything else… then retreated in slow motion. His trio of sons did not pursue. They must have all read Iron John during those long winter nights.

This tableau played out again and again over the next month, but there was never any bloodshed. Rather, an understanding was reached. Tiger Dad started coming to meals at the appointed times, but he waited until his boys were finished before digging in for himself. There’s always a two-or-three-foot space between him and AK. A little hissing. Nothing too serious. They’re working it out. Sometimes I’ll look out and see the three tigers playing and rolling around, while Tiger Dad observes from a satisfied distance. He has to know they are his.

And now we are in spring. The three tigers and two black cats are about to celebrate their first birthday, which in other circumstances would also be their midlife crisis. Time moves quickly for ferals, who without human intervention rarely survive two Ohio winters. You can fix this by bringing them inside for good, trading a short life of intense delights and sensations for long years spent with a nose against the window. They don’t know enough to make that choice, or spurn it. You have to be the one to decide that they will never roam, never really see the world, live as housecats. Sometimes, I wonder who made that decision for me.

With the exception of Sister Kitty, about whom more will be said another time, I’ve elected to leave everyone outside. To trap, neuter, and release them as well as I can, but to leave them as wild as they are meant to be. Danger Girl serves meals twice a day, a mixture of dry and wet food, while I fill a small water fountain. We have enough heated shelters to hold thirty cats, which is good because that’s about what we have some days.

I love all my cats but I have a special affection for Attack Kitty. He is the most beautiful of them, the sleekest, the fastest and most dangerous. You have to be born ugly, as I was, to truly appreciate beauty when you see it. His very existence feels like a deliberate gift. I was minding my own business in the barn when his mother brought him in. Her beloved son, with whom we have been well pleased, if occasionally impoverished in the course of it.

He meets me in the driveway at the end of the day, occasionally brings chipmunks to the door in consideration of my inept and ungraceful movements. His brothers wander off from time to time, but he never strays. Why should he? His possession of this fiefdom is more secure than mine. Inherited from his mother and father, then defended with blood and fury. We live here as rulers, but to quote that idiot George R.R. Martin, I only paid the gold price for it; the AK paid the iron.