without feeling fine

It was around this time last year that a small, black and orange female long-haired cat began showing up each night to munch on any food left over by our usual gang of ferals.

I named her "Contessa" because she looked like a photo-negative of Princess, another of our frequent feline visitors. This was soon shortened to "Tessa," "Tess," and (my favorite pet name for her) "Tessie the Tortoise." She became a regular, showing up first by herself, then later in the company of an even smaller female calico (a sister, we think) we named "Pepi." Tess made a point of watching out for her companion. She stood guard over the driveway until her friend had her fill, then the pair would take off together to their hidden lair.

The wife and I have a pretty good track record when it comes to earning the trust of the local ferals (to the point where the wife refuses to call them such, preferring "outside" or "garage" cats), but Tess was a hard sell. She loved the idea of human companionship, but would retreat to a safe distance whenever an actual pat or scratch loomed. She did eventually come around, and in the past few weeks would do figure-eights around my legs as I stroked her fur. She never warmed to being picked up, though, and the one time I presumed to try, she tried to razor my face with her claws, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to wash the stink of my touch from her fur.

Maura did managed to coax Tess and Pepi to take up residence in the garage for the winter. Beside the warmth and shelter the space provides, it was also supposed to give us an opportunity to keep tabs on the pair. The presence of the large, tough, and fiercely territorial neutered male Marmalade would keep away any would-be suitors until we got a chance to get the lasses seen to by the low-cost spay and neuter people. A reasonable plan, though it didn't stop Tess from getting knocked up by one of the oversexed toms who slipped through the population control net.

Tess, with Pepi in tow, left the garage's communal quarters for the privacy of their old hidden lair, though they still showed up at our house at mealtime. Once Tess gave birth to her litter, she and Pepi switched off between maternal duties, one keeping an eye on the kids while the other grabbed a bite to eat. (Poor Pepi got the shit end of the deal as Tess chose to linger and lounge on our patio for most of the day while Pepi was stuck babysitting.)

We'd been through a similar scenario with a mother cat and kits a few years previous. The ideal plan is to wait until the kittens have been weaned and start following the mother to the food station, then nab the lot of them. The mom gets spayed and released, and the kittens socialized for adoption. Based on information given to us by the local feral cat coalition person over the past couple weeks, Tess's kittens had started to wander and we'd begun to coordinate our plans accordingly.

Last night I got a call from the woman in charge of feral cat coalition. Some neighbors of ours had discovered a dead cat in their backyard and were too nervous about potential diseases to dispose of it, and she was wondering if we could take care of it for them. The corpse had dark fur and was located pretty close to where we figured that Tess and Pepi had their lair, which immediately had me imagining the worst. The last I'd seen Tess was Monday afternoon. She seemed well enough then, but she missed three mealtimes since.

It was late by the time Maura got home last night, so we had put off getting verification until this morning, hoping against hope that our fears would not be confirmed.

They were. In the mud of the neighbor's yard lay poor Tess's body. There weren't any signs of violence or other possible causes of death. Maura suspects she was poisoned (not intentionally) by something. I wonder if she wasn't clipped by a car (or knowing my neighborhood, some shithead speeding down the street in an SUV) and died trying to make it back to her hiding spot.

As rotten and unwelcome as the discovery was, at least we know what happened to her and aren't left to guess her whereabouts, and we were able to lay poor Tess to rest down by the back end of our yard.

A distressed and confused Pepi has since moved back into our garage, where hopefully she'll take up permanent residence. We've still got to round up Tess's litter, which will be trickier without having her around to vouch for us.

I knew on Monday that this was going to be one fuck of a week.

The Damned - I Just Can't Be Happy Today (from Machine Gun Etiquette, 1979) - No kidding.