All right now…kitties!
Those of you following along with Joy’s blog may remember Chime (pronounced Chim-eh), the socialized Tibetan kitty who moved in and promptly became a babymomma. Well, Chime and her chilluns have had their share of adventures already. You folks who cry easily at overwhelming combinations of cuteness, sadness, and family feelings can safely skip this post.
Editrix’ note: as you might have figured out by now, the phone numbers…of DOOM…were not in fact very DOOM-y. While our friends in Tso Pema completely believed in the lethal effect of the phone numbers listed, in fact not much happened when you dialed them. Lena proceeded to give one good friend of ours conniptions by grabbing his cell phone and dialing, to see what would happen. It was good for a chuckle. Alrighty then. Moving on…
Chime had three kitties: Tiger, a dark-toned striped tabby; Leopard, a lighter-toned tabby, and Smoke, who came out solid gray.
Lama Wangdor Rimpoche blessed them all before leaving for the States. Shortly after Chime moved in came a tom cat who decided he wanted our house to be his territory thank you very much, and he made several attempts to get at the new-born kittens. Chime and her brood were put in protective custody in Joy and Lena’s bedroom because this tom was so persistent.
Girlgeek that I am, I Google’d this behavior. I’ve never seen anything like this before. The cat site I found sez toms do this as a territorial thing when they’re not the babydaddy–they kill the kittens so the queen goes back into heat, ensuring any kittens that come along later are really theirs. How, or why, cats evolved this survival of the daddybaby fittest is beyond me.
Man, evolution is just like gravity sometimes–it really sucks…
On the whole cats in our part of India are wild, *not* domesticated. The large dog population also means that cats are few and shy and stealthy. There simply isn’t a cultural set-up for keeping pets. Animals stay outdoors, people can go indoors. That’s pretty much how it works. There’s only two other people in town I know of who keep cats as pets. Chime is something of an exception–she’s well socialized to people, and answers to things said to her in Tibetan. She also eats momos like a Khampa. The lack of any cultural setting for pet ownership here also means all the accoutrements are also missing. Pet food? 12 hours away, in Delhi. Flea powder? Ditto. Kitty litter? Ya gotta be kiddin’. After weeks of feeding Chime on an “edited” Tibetan diet–namely all the mutton, eggs and dairy she can eat–the days when Joy and Lena and I raised a possum on some super-duper all-organic kitty crunchy nuggets seem like some sort of fairy tale. I can just imagine the looks of bewilderment I would get if I tried to describe this politically-correct cat chow to folks here in Rewalsar. But I digress…
Presumably the tom will stop going after the kittens after they’ve grown to a certain size, and look more like fellow cats than prey. So Chime and her brood are staying safely in their bedroom fort, Tiger and Leopard nursing and sleeping and so on as young ‘uns do.
Smoke, unfortunately, didn’t stay with this program. There’s no way to tell what happened to her. She stopped nursing, had breathing difficulties, and started crawling away from her litter mates. Chime just let her be. Years ago on a fiber arts mailing list, a good friend explained this phenomenon. Some animals can smell when a kit in the litter has been born with Something Seriously Wrong, and simply neglect the blighted offspring, because there’s no point in helping it survive. She also wrote about how when this phenomenon starts happening, any good-natured human rescue operations are pretty much doomed. The only two options–both of which suck–are to either let the kit die, or kill it if it’s really suffering. Whatever went wrong with Smoke, it killed her before she grew very big. Chime smelled something wrong, and by the next day it was obvious Smoke wasn’t going to make it.
Chime and the others were in the box with Smoke when she passed away. Poor Malka, our gentle-natured vegan bhi-bhi, was upset by seeing the little body when I laid it out on a katak. Pia, who is mother to a tulku (reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist Rimpoche) and was staying at the house, chanted a few manis and other prayers over Smoke’s body. Afterwards Pia and I talked a bit about Smoke’s karma. I posted a bit about animal karma in Tso Pema earlier: there’s a certain number of little baby animals–monkeys, dogs, and such–who end up dying after only a few days or weeks of life. It’s one of those things that makes me wonder about the Master Plan. Anyway, we think Smoke expiated some bad karma with her short life–although she didn’t live long, she survived just long enough to be born in our house with all of its juju, and have Rimpoche give her blessings. We decided the little kitten actually had a decent shot at a human rebirth.
Smoke lived up to her name. I took her down on kora. We went around the lake once, I sprinkled some of the lake water on her, and cremated her over by the prayer flags. Some monkeys stopped by to witness the whole thing. Pia also gave me special incense and camphor to burn with the body. A cairn went over the ashes, and afterwards Smoke’s katak went up with the prayer flags.
*sigh*
Meanwhile, back at the ranch….Tiger and Leopard are growing in size and cuteness. They haven’t quite mastered walking yet, but when they do…well, that’ll be another blog post.
Oh, thank you for the pictures. Poor little Smoke - I agree that mommakitties know when something is wrong. But if one can only have a few days on earth, it sounds like those few hours were lovely. Chime is beautful and wise, to find such a home. On her behalf, thank you for keeping her and the weekits safe from the babydaddy; bears do that too. Nature works in interesting ways, to say the least. I think it’s soothing to look at kitties, either in photo or flesh.
Comment by Dale-Harriet in WI | April 14, 2007