A few days ago, I learned that my kittens' mother's name is Bella. She's a lynxpoint like Azalyn, and from above they look quite similar (though Azalyn wears a collar). Unfortunately, the poor cat's face isn't nearly as cute (although it's not obvious from photos).
Bella is about six years old. We first learned of her when our neighbor Hiram's granddaughter acquired a kitten, who was to live at Hiram's house along with all those other cats. This was Bella. Next we saw her with a litter of kittens - they wanted to come down to the street to meet us and the other passers-by, but Bella was having none of it, aggressively charging toward us to keep us away.
More kittens followed (as they invariably did with Hiram's cats). D's coworker L, a member of Hiram's family, sent me a photo a few days ago of her cross-eyed cat Poopsie, one of Bella's many children. We think her son, whom we call "Derwood," fathered some of Samantha's kittens before we were able to get her spayed, and her brother (also adopted by Hiram's family) looks very much like our Ginevra.
Last year, she started eating at my house, but I knew she belonged to Hiram's family so I didn't presume to take her away for surgery. She had her latest litter of kittens on April 25, and she did her usual good job of shielding them from the outside world (I assume that like most of Samantha's kittens, they were born in the crawlspace below Hiram's house, though L. said that one year she had a litter in the crawlspace between the ceiling and the roof). Even though she kept coming to my house for food (which is why I know what day the kittens were born), she didn't bring the kittens over until mid-July.
Bella with Azalyn (behind her) and Tertius (on the right):
She makes a funny sniffing sound when she eats, so I've been calling her Snoofy. She knows better than to scold Samantha, the matriarch of my porch, but she successfully drove away JoJo, the mother of the other kittens I adopted. She definitely lunges in to get the food when I put it out, dashing from one plate to the next as if she dare not miss out on any. The rest of our porch cats just assume that food is their birthright and aren't at all desperate, but poor Bella must not have that assumption.
When I saw Hiram in December, he agreed that it would be fine for me to get her spayed, and now that the kittens are back outside and the garage is available, it was time to catch her. I put almost a full can of food in the back of the cat carrier last night and held the other seven "porch cats" back while she investigated the carrier from the outside and then, intelligently, went back to her usual place under the lawn chair. I took the carrier over to her, set it down in the wet grass, and pretended to look another direction, and she did go in for the food, and that was that.
J. drove her to clinic this morning, and I spoke with the vet this afternoon before driving over to collect her. She has some issues. First, he said her uterus was quite delicate, and another pregnancy could have been too much for her. Also, she had a badly infected tooth, which he removed. She also has some jaundice, and he recommended a couple of supplements - the associated liver problem could be something temporary, or it could be more serious, but in either case she's probably just going to live out her life in my yard without further veterinary care, unless I miraculously manage to tame her.
Time for me to go out to J's garage to check on her.
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