Stubby

Stubby was an orange feral cat that ruled all other animals in our neighborhood in Sulphur Springs.

We first saw Stubby loping across the front yard. Even from a distance, you could tell his face was scarred from a number of fights, and carried a frowning attitude of “I’m the boss, you’re not.”

We saw him a couple more times, trotting across the front yard or the back yard, but we didn’t take serious notice until the day he beat up Not Figaro, our cat. Stubby didn’t cause much damage to Not Figaro, but he did get across the fact of who was the Neighborhood Bad Guy in Charge.

One day Priscilla and I came from somewhere, and we saw Stubby sacked out on the back of the couch, happy as a pig. He was asleep, but he didn’t stay that way. “Hey!” I said, and Stubby was gone. He shot off the couch like, well like a cat whose tail had been dipped in turpentine. He went down the hall toward a bathroom, and that is when Priscilla and I discovered there was a cat entry on a wall of the dirty clothes hamper closet. The closet door had a hinged hatch to put dirty clothes through and into the hamper. Or, an entry into the house for an enterprising feral cat, which survived by taking every advantage possible. As near as we could figure, there was an entry from the crawl space into the wall, and then into the closet.

A few weeks later, we were wakened after 2 a.m. by spitting, hissing and caterwauling, the sounds of Not Figaro defending himself against Stubby. We didn’t see Stubby, but there wasn’t any other cat with the cattitude to come into the house at night, eat the cat food in the kitchen and then attack Not Figaro for complaining.

There came a time we didn’t often see Stubby or discover him napping on the couch or attacking Not Figaro. We figured the cat rises and the cat falls.

Then one day I was looking out the kitchen window and decided Stubby was still around.

Across the back yard trotted an orange cat, and behind her, in file, were four orange kittens, each sporting a stubby tail.