A Tale of Two Kitties

We were ready to welcome a new cat into the family during the first year of the pandemic but couldn’t get close to a kitten for love or money.  We had lost our Coco kitty in March to sudden illness, and all through the summer I searched on rescue and humane society websites, on regional “kittens wanted” Facebook groups, on Petfinder with a 200 mile radius.  Every available kitten was scooped up within moments, and all that was left behind were the begging, pleading comments streaming off each post.  We were in the running against a large and desperate pack of forlorn kitten contenders, and our application forms were locked and loaded and ready to launch into any portal that was open long enough for us to reach it. 

It didn’t help that we were picky.  I was determined to find another tortoiseshell, in honor of the best kitty I’ve ever known, Coco.  We didn’t want a solid color cat, or a tuxedo cat, or an orange tiger stripe cat.  We wanted a cat with a certain kind of marking and expression, a certain look in the eye, a certain kind of energy.  We wanted a female.  We’d spend hours swiping through cat photos like Tinder, with no’s far outnumbering yes’s, knowing that we’d be happy with any snaggletoothed ally cat we could be so lucky to have. 

It wasn’t until November that I saw the photos of one tiny tortiseshell and one grey tiger kitten on our local humane society website.  I called that moment and they offered the next possible appointment the following day, which alone was like winning the lottery.  Naturally, we only expected to visit the kitties and begin the arduous and uncertain process, but an hour after saying “we love them both,” we were walking out of the building with not one but two fat folders full of information and two cardboard boxes with a kitten each.  The staff and volunteers had invested a lot of time and care into these particular kitties, and now they sent them off with enthusiasm, extra blankets, familiar toys, and a bag of premium kitten food.  We were stunned. 

This is what we knew — they were both born around the same time to different mothers, both wild and feral, and both litters were brought into the shelter on the same day.  We don’t know how each litter of kittens fared in the wild, whether they were in cozy barns, or cold abandoned buildings, in the woods, or under porches in a caring neighborhood, but around eight weeks old, someone scooped them up and away from their mothers and brought them to the Humane Society.  The two batches of kittens entered an expert cycle of care, warmth, litter boxes, bowls of wet food, and gentle loving hands — the efforts to welcome them into human civilization took patience and skill.  Once cleared for health and temperament, spayed, neutered and micro-chipped, their photos were taken for an adoption listing where they were instantly Hoovered into homes across the county.  

Our two kittens were to last ones left from each litter. The tortoiseshell was clearly the runt who was so small when she arrived they said she was “just a pair of eyes.” They assured us she was not technically a midget or dwarf cat, and that she had made huge progress since arriving, but she might have trouble with stairs. She was balled up tight in her little cage and did not want to come out, but she did nuzzle our hands when we put them in and her little golden toes peeked out and sealed the deal. The other one was so busy chasing her own tail and rocketing to the top of the climbing pole that we only had a fleeting impression that she indeed had the energy and the look we were seeking. 

This turned out to be Bootsy.  Once home, she bolted out of the box with alacrity and charm.  Her markings are striking, pure black lines painted onto a fine sable coat, wet glossy ink drawn in patterns of perfect symmetry. She’s marked with the crisp, exact arcs and zigzags of the deepest jungle creatures, the jaguar, the leopard,  the serval.  The lined eyes of Egyptian funerary artists grace her features,  the flow of perfect stripes moves over the crown and down her neck, the fearful geometry of the tiger ripples down her front legs.  Her thick, short fur is soft like a mink, her chin and underbelly glows golden with complexity.

Bootsy moves through the room like she’s ready to kick ass and take names, her sense of self is a wonder to watch.  Within the first moment of emerging from the foundling box into her new palace of comfort, she owned every square inch. She absorbed it all in an instant, a few sniffs around the edges and soon she was anointing the litter box like a queen.  

As she moved through the room on the first day, it’s obvious that this kitten carries the lineage of a hundred wild generations throughout her frame, especially in her freakishly large paws.  This is more than a simple extra toe, the cat has full double paws.   They meet the earth like elephant feet, wide padded staffs of stability, but these are designed to kill.  She has not one, but two opposable thumbs on each paw, glided with fine pinpoint razors.   Her front legs are bowed out like she just slid off a long ride on the range, she swaggers when she walks, the curves in the front arms are all the better for scooping up the prey with her massive mittens.  

Bootsy's pupils are tuned towards movement, and her body tenses like a trained dog when a bird flutters in a tree she cannot see. She can’t see the bird, she can’t see the tree, she doesn’t even know what a window is, but she sensed the shift of light and shadow within her periphery and her instincts were loaded in a nano-second.  This is the wisdom of generations of cats surviving in the wild, preying on more birds and small mammals than we are ready to comprehend.  

For now, Bootsy will be an indoor cat, it is winter and there’s a large house to explore, including a rodent filled basement that we are eager to introduce her to. She is a fine-tuned feline killing machine, and we aim to keep her inside, yet she’s clearly voracious in drive to conquer. She studies the door when it opens, she is making plans to expand her world, you can just tell it is going to be a problem to keep her inside. 

Here’s how she met the dog, a large yellow lab who is mellow and sore with age.  Bucky was kept out of my office where the kitties were quarantined for the first  weeks, and all three of them exchanged long, curious sniffs underneath the door. The kittens could hear his paws coming down the hallway, hear his whines to be let inside, we all knew how bereft he was to be excluded and demoted.  He had a dog bed in the office for the days he liked to keep me company, the kittens knew his smell intimately and had assumed the dog bed as their own. 

The kittens got a lot of attention those first weeks, but we were sensitive to Bucky’s jealously and pledged to give him double love and extra walks.  When I couldn’t take his forlorn sighs behind the closed door any more, when the kittens had relaxed enough to lounge around the office like it was a sultan’s den, snacking on rich pates, surrounded by soft and special things, blissed out and milk drunk on the oversized dog bed, I opened the door and let him in. 

Good boy, good Bucky, nice and slow, I commanded.  Praising him, soothing him, congratulating him on his noble approach, he sniffed around the room while Bootsy watched and the other kitten burrowed deeper into her small dark hole.   Bootsy didn’t flinch as he clattered around her den, Bucky gave her the side eye, afraid to look directly at this new thing.  She sat upright and relaxed, he approached and they touched noses in a sniff, and soon she was stretched out in an eyes-half-closed pose of approval.  We have always called Bucky an Omega dog, the opposite of Alpha, the submissive and deferential dog, and Bootsy seemed to be making plans to rig up a saddle for his back and command him as her personal steed. 

What about the other kitten?  We wondered about her too, for we rarely saw her the first month.  All we knew was that she was a female toritshell with green eyes and golden toes, a diminutive echo of our Queen Coco. 

Where Bootsy expanded instantly to fill her new den with natural dominion,  the other kitten shrank.  She withdrew into herself with such force she involuted into thin air.  I wished I’d taken more care when opening her box and introducing her to the room, I assumed a timid yet curious little kitten would emerge.  Instead, a tightly wound ball of fear and vigilance jammed itself into the smallest possible space and stayed there.  

My office has plenty of deep hiding spaces, stacks of boxes in front of bookshelves, an old armchair with sagging springs,  creaky oak dressers. She wedged and burrowed into all of them, we could find her only by the gleam of her enormous eyes in the dark corners, her fur the perfect camouflage for the shadows, her optic pans dialed open and stuck in a state of alarm reflecting back to us.   We left plates of wet food as close to her as we could get, and tried to keep Bootsy sated so the little kitty could have a chance. 

One day I couldn’t find her, I crawled along the perimeter of the room and peered into all of her places and she was gone. A few hours later, I called for reinforcements and my husband found her, or at least her tail.  It was hanging down underneath one of the dressers, where she had jammed herself between the closed drawer and the backing, a space of maybe two inches.  She must have been spread eagle in the crack like a spider and only a few inches of her tail was hanging down. 

Bootsy has the energy of the Roman army rippling through her fibers, she was born fully trained for destruction, death, and decadence.  She pounded around the room and thumped and wollopped everything in her path.  She was only twelve weeks old and her mega-paws filled the palm of my hand. The little torishell kitty had tiny dark paws with golden patches, and at a distance, it created an illusion of even smaller paws, half-paws.  Boosty had a fist full of knives, but the little one seemed to have barely any claws at all - she used her paws like the fins of a fish, waving towards things with a gentle, impotent brush. 

We cooed at her and soothed her from a distance as best we could.  Occasionally we’d find the two of them snuggled deeply into a corner, and were greatly relieved the little one was receiving healing warmth, that her fried nervous system was relaxing into the rhythms of a feline embrace.  We couldn’t provide any physical comfort, only soft blankets and beds, we knew she needed to unwind the stone cold fear that set in her bones and that touch could help, but not ours.  

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I’ve never wanted to replace a thing like I did Coco.  I didn’t want just another cat in the house, I wanted one like her.  A tiny tortoiseshell female with green eyes and golden toes.  A tail with constant expression, a voice that was less meow and more chatter and chortle, wise kitty words.  A cat who exuded intelligence and smarts.  Only another tortisehell would do, an idea that fixed early and stayed strong throughout the half-year search. 

It is a bias based on coat-color, yet there’s a little bit of science that suggests that tortoise might be distinctive.  There’s only been one study done into the correlation between coat and personality, and tortoise stood out for their “tortitude” — it’s true that every tuxedo cat I’ve known has been a dingbat, and every orange cat a thug.

Yet in every measure, this cat came up short - tortie or not, she was clearly not Coco, they were very different critters.   The fault with attempting to find a replacement became clear, it’s just not fair to the new one, they will always disappoint as they stand in the after-shadow of the deceased.  The fallen rises up to perfection, while the one standing before you becomes known only by its deficiencies.  It took awhile for the comparisons to purge, which was a relief.  We tried to figure out who this new kitty was, but first she needed a name. 

Bootsy arrived with her name already implanted in our minds.  More than one of us claims to have named her, we each believe we were the first to refer to her that way within the first moments of her arrival. But we all agree that there was no question — with paws like that, Bootsy simply is. Sometime we call her ‘The Boot” and we have fun with the pronunciation of Bootes, the constellation in the sky. 

The other kitty, who we barely knew and wasn’t exactly making a great first impression, remained nameless for a rather long time.  So long that I considered it was a sign that maybe we should return her - I wasn’t sure we were doing her any favors here at our house, instead of getting comfortable and relaxing, she seemed to be re-traumatized every time there was a loud noise or sudden movement.  She seemed much more comfortable in her tiny cage at the shelter. The longer she remained nameless, the more I wondered if this was the right place. 

We tried out a dozen names and nothing made sense. It was all forced and based on a cat we hoped she would one day become, such as a Trixie or Ruby.  The only names that seemed to match with her personality and way of being in the world were Weasel, Marmot, Martin, Stoat — when we saw her at all, she was a stiff, fleeting streak of crouched shadow. Her tortoise colorations were mostly black with an uneven sprinkle and a few smudges of tan, only her toes had the golden spots.  Where Bootsy’s fur is every inch symmetry painted by the creators practiced hand,  this kitty was a splat of paint on the studio floor.  Naming her was a challenge. 

Finally, after about a month, we came into agreement that we should just go with what we know so far — she’s a miniature cat, so we’ll call her Mini, Min-Min, Minzer, Minnow.  She is rather fish-like. 

We opened the door to the rest of the house after three weeks when Bootsy was about to take matters into her own enormous paws and twist the doorknob herself — the way she sat and studied it was a little scary. 

Predictably, Bootsy mapped the entire upstairs in one tour, launched into the downstairs rooms, and immediately accepted her expanded dominion.  For Mini, this development fried her circuits and set her back significantly.  We didn’t see her again for a week. 

With long hallways and big rooms to amplify her footfalls, Bootsy moves through the house like rolling thunder, like a rider on the storm.   I wouldn’t be surprised to see her cruising down the road on a fat Harley someday, leather-clad and studded, with the mufflers tuned to maximum roar.  She’s got that look in her eye, she’s the boss of any hog, her powerful limbs and copious thumbs would thrill to the throttle. 

For those first months, we’d say to ourselves, it’s a good thing these kitties  are so different. What if we had two cats like Bootsy?  They’d tear the house down.———————————-

Mini is terrified of the humans, the ones who ply her with soft beds, toys, rich foods and sweet words.  She’s in a stiffened state of terror in our presence, hunched, alarmed, with a tail that sticks straight out and doesn’t bend.  It’s like she’s plugged into a low-voltage source that keeps her electrified and taught.  If she comes out while I’m working in the office, all I have to do is slide my glasses up on my head and she bolts. 

Meanwhile, her feline sister is a savage who uses her as a plaything.  Bootsy is a natural-born killer and her kitten-play could turn deadly in a heart beat — I’ve watched her pin little Mini and lunge for the windpipe with a force of a million generations, the ancestral lioness echoing through every move.  That’s who she should be afraid of. 

Thankfully, Mini is not just a punching bag, she gets some good swats in. They are far from equally matched, but Mini does initiate a pounce about a quarter of the time and enjoys a good parry.  She can and does squirm out of the feline full nelson when she needs to and she is soon prancing back for more.  But all the while I’m worried that Bootsy will accidentally kill her, it would be so easy. We humans give her nothing but comfort and gentle kindness and she’s terrified, but the cat who beats the crap out of her every day, no problem.

Mini is a kitty pulled in two directions, two opposing forces of biological imperative.  One is a force of urgent fear and alarm that she felt in her mothers chemical cascade and rapid heart while in the womb.  Tightly coiled tensions wound around this kitties bones while they were still soft, and they hardened into a defensive crouch.  This force jams her away from us whenever we appear or make a noise, her mother’s survival a testament to her skill of escape and hiding. 

The opposing force is the one that needs mammalian comfort to survive, needs the bonding that comes from grooming and plush comforts.  She’s curious and desperate for this loving, you can see the two halves of her body twist and torque, one running away, the other straining forward.   She takes one step forward then snaps back down the hallway.  She sees one of us and freezes in her crouch, then lurches forward, then runs away with flying limbs.  

It’s at feeding time when the biological needs collide and the force of hunger brings her forward.  Here I delay the opening of the can to give Mini time in my presence, where she keeps her front end as far away as possible while her backend steps backwards.  I use my hands like wide paddles of gentle pressure, not scratching or petting, no rapid movements, but slow and steady pressure on both sides of her.  She stays in motion and paces back and forth, and moves through my palms like a chute.  

I focus on her stiff tail as she slides through, curving it, bending it, gripping the base and giving it a wiggle, trying to get some mobility and life force into the thing.  I run my fingers down both sides of her spine, smoothing down her network of neural pathways that are tangled at the switchboard, adding a zig zag that crosses the midline from crown to root to encourage integration. She never stops moving for this, she’s constantly moving both away and towards me at the same time, stillness is not an option. 

After about three months, Mini had widened to the size of two slice toaster and it was time to wean them off the wet food.  In our house, wet food is for the bookends of life and kibble is for the duration. Wet food was essential for them both, as it was about relationship and positive association as much as it was nutrition and calories. It was often the only time we saw Mini, they both knew the regular feeding time and swarmed us until we produced the goods. We began spacing out the wet food feasts with more and more days until the final can was consumed. 

Mini shrugged it off pretty easily and settled right into constant kibble, but Bootsy took her complaints to the management, following us around, lasering into us with the evil eye, darting between our feet and roadblocking us at the top of the stairs.  We became the wet food she was after, all she had to do was kill one of us and she could feast for weeks. 

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Bootsy is a busy-body, trailing after everyone, always getting up to investigate.  She has a need to confirm and understand what is going on.  Strange sounds send her towards the source with her tail twitching, while Mini dives under the covers and isn’t seen again for hours.  What ever is going on, Bootsy is in the middle of it - she thinks the sweeping broom is just grand, especially those little piles of crumbs and bits, she dives into it again and again. Packages are a dream, especially the tape and empty box. Groceries, the mail, anything that enters the house she needs to investigate.  Mini’s world is very small, and she likes it that way, while Bootsy’s horizons are straining against the house walls. 

Bootsy crawls into the dishwasher when it is open, she follows me into the bathroom and jumps on the seat, she waits with the dog at his food bowl, eager to be present for the event.  Worse, she flies up the stairs when she hears me cooing to Mini.  We talk to Bootsy like an athlete on the field, trying to get her to rein in her power, stay in line and not destroy the house. We talk to Mini like a newborn baby, with lots of gentle sweetness and soft tones.  When Boosty is downstairs roaming and Mini is lonely upstairs, she will often come out into the hall and consider an interaction.  As soon as I start talking to Mini, trying to coax her down the hall, her lead-footed sister comes charging up to the stairs to see whats’s going on, like a jacked-up cop on the beat.  

Fortunately, she’s not a complete attention hog.  I pay her no mind whatso ever in these moments, except to nudge her away if she gets too close. I keep my focus on Mini and reward her approach with long stokes and scratches and Boots soon gets bored and goes on her way.  Mini can handle a few moments of positive interaction and touch before she gets overcome and runs away, comforted by her own startle reflexes. 

Have you ever seen a cat twist in two, pop right in half?  That’s what Mini does every time she sees us. She strains forward towards connection while rocketing backwards into safety, it’s a wonder she’s still in one piece. 

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The way Bootsy studies the world really makes one wonder about the relationship between hands and brain development.  She’s definitely getting more sensory input through her extra large paws.  When she walks on your thighs, the breadth of the warmth emanating from those pads is surprising, even after you’ve come to expect it.  There’s extra information flowing through her system, and the powers of cognition have expanded to meet it. 

Given the right conditions, she seems capable of inventing the wheel.  

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Bootsy is always one of two places, underfoot or on our laps. Her ownership of a seated lap, especially one with a soft blanket, is pre-ordained, divine law.  She assumes her position without acknowledgement, she simply begins by tossing her head back with sinuous abandon and flexing her paws in ecstasy, awaiting the stroking hand.  

The wood stove is her alter, she’s a shameless supplicant, stretched out along the length of its warm embrace. We bought a little kitty bed that’s perfectly round, deep, and fluffy, and put it near the wood stove where she immediately found her place deep within its curves.  Sometimes we’d only see her ears  peeking out, sometimes the back leg fully extended into the air, sometimes her head lolling over the edge in an overheated stupor.  We call it the kitty hot tub.  Sometimes she spills right over the edge in a long soft stream of silken fur, draped and drunken and limp, like a soft-porn photoshoot of feline decadence. 

Mini, we don’t even know where she sleeps.  We suspect it is under the extra bed in our daughters room, the one that is against the wall and has a thick coverlet that drapes to the floor, we imagine she spends about 20 of every 24 hours under there, but we haven’t investigated.  If she’s under there processing her fears and steadying her nervous system, deep within a sensory deprivation chamber of safety, then we certainly don’t want to disturb it.  She materializes when she does, but most of the time she’s simply not present.

Mini can barely screw up the courage to walk along the upstairs hallway from the bedroom to the office. Bootsy shoots down the hall on hyperdirve, ricocheting and scaling the vertical surfaces with an inner momentum that has yet to meet its match. The stairs are her launching pad. Wherever the action is, she slinks into the center, tuned in, turned on, and running hot. 

Bootsy rules over both floors and the large seven room home plus the full basement, often emerging from the darkness frosted with ancient cobwebs.  She prowls along the windowsills chattering and vibrating with tension and expectation.  Mini has made it down the full set of stairs perhaps three times in six months, each time a brief, wide-eyed, high strung endeavor that ends quickly with her snapping back up to safety.  So we have a downstairs cat and an upstairs cat.  

We spend most of our time as a family in the den, where the books, couch,  dog bed, and wood stove are.  The stairs leading to the second floor go up along the wall above the couch, and the fourth stair down has become Mini’s perch.  She hangs out on the stair edge and watches us like she’s watching an adventure movie, her head swiveling back and forth with wide eyes to follow us as we move around the world.  Between Bootsy, Bucky and the humans, there’s a lot to keep track of and she seems genuinely entertained. She’s up there most nights, her tiny golden paws hang over the edge, her little head strains forward with interest, she doesn’t run away when we say her name and extend a hand.  

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She presents her back end for attention while looking over her hunched shoulders in wide-eyed anticipation. She’s a roly-poly little kitty with a width out of proportion to her length, she’s a tiny chunker. Her backend behaves like an overloaded semi-truck, always on the verge of a jack-knife.  When she sits down to commence a cleaning session, she tends to flop over with the weight.  She has a habit of rolling her backend onto one hip and as her girth spreads out, her head remains high and tiny, making her look like a microscopic Jabba the Hut. 

By Valentines Day, Mini had reached some key developmental milestones.  Her tail had softened from a rigid, awkward appendage that shot out in a straight line into something closer to a naturally curving expression. Once, she ran towards me down the hall, a motion so unusual that she surprised us both.  I think she was genuinely excited to see me and her enthusiasm pushed her forward faster than her fears.  It ended in a skitter and a spaz, but I took it as an excellent sign of progress.  The next major milestone was a crash and a bang as she knocked over her first plant. 

Bootsy reached this milestone within the first 24 hours, and she learned her lesson fast with a stern scolding — she’s smart enough to understand and lord knows she needs to get the message that she’s not the alpha around here.  The number of plants in this house is considerable, and they must remain outside of her dominion or it will look like an overturned potting shed every time we come home. 

When I heard the crash upstairs, I looked at Bootsy nestled in her kitty hot tub and smiled — Mini was up there pushing the edge of her known world, exploring the windowsills, sniffing the greenery. She was firing new neurons and mapping new zones and then bang — I didn’t need to see it to know that she shot like a cannon into her little hole and we barely noticed when we didn’t see her again for days.  She was under the bed, we assume, recovering and processing the calamity, and I’m pretty sure the houseplants upstairs are safe for a good while longer. 

By Easter, Bootsy is in a full blown love affair with her dog, Bucky.  She gazes at him with longing, ambushes him around the corners, lays down in front of him and reaches out with gentle taps, inquires for engagement of any type. When he harmlessly snaps his jaws in her direction, she thrills with excitement and jumps up to take the party to the next level.  Bucky is annoyed and would like some peace, Bootsy is desperate for some action.

She takes full ownership of his orthopedic dog bed, choosing it over her hot tub on most days. The old yellow lab stands next to his bed looking down at this little cat who has stretched to her full length and managed to leave no room on the copious cushion.  He’s such a good boy that he won’t step onto the bed until we move Bootsy to the side and hold her back until he gets settled.  She then snuggles in with the huge dog, taking deep inhales of his paws and fur, and turns her purr up to 11 while Bucky sighs with resignation.  She loves him so much, she’d take his face in her fat paws and make out with him if he’d let her. 

Bootsy goes on wild kitty tears through the house, burning out in crazy spins that leave the rugs in a tangle.  She’s bolted for the open door more than once and it is a matter of time before her killing power is prowling among the songbirds, voles, and mice.  I tried a collar with a bell and it was truly awful — for an hour, she was contorting in seizures of panic and confusion, it was clear that she was going to lose her prodigious mind and go insane if it stayed on.  Next is the clown collar, a fabric ruff with crazy designs that give the birds a few moments of extra awareness before she pounces, which I am sure she will hate, but hopefully she will only feel silly and ridiculous, not insane. 

As the daffodils began to rise and the bluebirds land on the nesting box, Mini begins to weave between my feet while I sit at the desk. She reaches her little golden paws up my leg for attention, a pressure so slight I hardly notice.  I reach down and give her a pat and then get back to work, but she wants more.  Preoccupied and distracted, I scoop her up and put her on my lap, and she purrs and circles back and forth like it’s always been this way, her tail straight in the air and tickling my face.  She walks onto the desk, tiny paws clicking the mouse pad and prancing along the keyboard, jeopardizing my work but worth it.  

It’s taken six months, but this little trauma bound kitty has unwound a few notches and has accepted the safety and stability of our home. She’s still only four steps down the stairway to the whole second half of the house, but last night she was stretched out on her stair with her paw extended languidly, watching us with a casual gaze, perched in her balcony of observation in a state of deep contentment.  We coo and cheer her on, congratulating her new confidence and sense of comfort and she gives us a slow blink of acceptance before Bootsy has to charge up there to investigate. 

These two kitties are a balanced pair of temperaments, both born feral, both separated from their mothers and brought into the warmth of human care on the same day, but imprinted with opposite inclinations.  Bootsy was born ready, her sharp mind matched by sharper instincts and served by massive paws, the world is her pleasure playground. For Mini, half a year of calm security has only just begun to soften the grip her fear-soaked first weeks. She’s literally floating above the world from a safe distance, four steps down from certainty, residing in an in-between reality while her circuits get soothed, rewired, and welcomed home.  

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One Year Update

In the late summer of that year, we figured both kitties were celebrating their first birthday, each in their own way.  Bootsy had expanded her kingdom to the great outdoors and was full of pride.  They way she struts back into the house then preens in the center of the large dog bed is all ego.  She relented to both the clown collar and the bell, and in fact she seems to like them.  She parades around the yard asking, don't you like my new collar?  It's a modern lion's mane, and she seems to feel perfectly at home in it.  As for the bell, I think her senses became so overwhelmed with delight in the outside world, that she no longer hears it.  

Unfortunately, neither do the birds.  Both the extra visibility and the jingle isn't enough to save them all.  Saddest of all, she caught not one but two hummingbirds her first summer.  That's a testament to her skill, but devastating for us as longtime bird enthusiasts, bird feeders, and bird-friendly gardeners.  It seems to be a binary choice -- if we are going to let Bootsy outside, we can no longer continue to feeds the birds at our two deluxe feeding stations, filled with nuts, seeds, fruit, suet, and hand-mixed  humming bird food, Nor should we fill the popular bird baths with fresh water nestled in the garden, and plant flowers we know the birds and butterflies love. She also came in the house with more than one monarch!  We can't draw these vulnerable creatures into our yard when we've let a killer loose. 

It's a serious dilemma and we limit her time outside, but keeping her in was impossible -- she bolts for the door every time it opens, she strikes like a viper, more than once she's been squashed in half by the slamming door, every cell of her being is a magnetized force demanding her presence outside. 

In the mornings, she joins her best buddy the dog, both shooting outside side by side, Boosty kicking up her hind legs with a mustang flourish, setting out to conquer the new day.   

Mini had a more subtle breakthrough, but we all noticed that around her first birthday, she started showing up more.  With Bootsy gone and otherwise occupied, this gave Mini the space to figure some things out on her own terms.  Bootsy didn't bully Mini (they ate together peacefully, sniffed and licked each other with affection) but she did dominate, harass, and run her around the upstairs rooms to exhaustion.  Mini was her plaything, which didn't leave a lot of room for Mini to explore on her own.  Once Bootsy was either outside, or inside sleeping off her wild benders, Mini moved into the available space.  With caution but increasing confidence, Mini descended the stairs and joined the fringes.