When you live on a farm, you choose your cats for mousing ability
rather than for their cuddlesome qualities.
It's the reason I chose Fiddle, a skinny, green-eyed tortie with long
paws and a fearsomely quick pounce.
Of course, I didn't know she was a good hunter when I got her. But her
mother was a good mouser, according to my friend Nancy, whose grain
storage was mouse-free, so it was worth the risk.
She was cuddly when she was a kitten, round, with soft fur. As she
matured, her baby fat melted from her bones and she became a skinny,
spooky, predatory cat. She reverted to her cuddly kitten self only
when she was pregnant. When the kittens were weaned, she returned to
her career as Lurker-in-the-
When Fiddle was five years old, I had a run of spontaneous abortion in
my ewes. The distressing part was that the ewes miscarried late in the
pregnancy. In the middle of the thrill and hustle of lambing, all that
new life, my favourite part of the year, came the shock of lamb after
lamb emerging from the womb, tiny, perfect and dead. Over half my
lambs never drew breath, or had any possibility of it.
Belladonna was one of the last to lamb and, like most of the others,
she delivered early. She'd shown no signs of imminent delivery; no
triangular hollow in front of the hip to indicate the lamb had dropped
into position, no swollen udder, no nesting behaviour. She just pushed
out a tiny black lamb, covered with the slime of birth, onto the
manure of the barn floor and stood looking at it.
Without hope, I wiped the remains of the sac away from the muzzle and
was astonished to hear a little gasp. The tiny thing shook its ears
and produced a barely audible bleat. Belladonna strolled away. I
tucked the baby, slime and all, into my jacket and headed for the
house through the late-March snow.
I kept colostrum in the freezer for just this kind of emergency. While
I was feeding the newly-dried lamb her first meal, Fiddle, who must
have sneaked into the house on my heels, came creeping across the room
and put a tentative paw onto my knee. Before she could pounce, I
brushed her off.
"Not a mouse," I said to her, although I could hardly blame her for
thinking of the lamb as prey. I could cup it in my hands with the legs
dangling through my fingers. On my kitchen scale, it weighed a bare
two pounds.
A newborn lamb has to be fed every two hours. A barn full of lambing
ewes has to be checked every three or four hours. I was already
strained from the lack of uninterrupted sleep. Keeping Fiddle out of
the house was impossible; she was not Lurker-in-the-
nothing. Time and again I found her at my knee as I fed the lamb.
I kept the lamb in a box with a towel and hot-water bottle, in the
spare room with the door closed. When I got up at night, I would check
first to see if it was worth warming the bottle. I fully expected the
lamb to die between one feeding and the next, but she hung on.
Finally the inevitable happened, and I failed to close the door
properly when I went to get the bottle. Padding back upstairs in my
nightgown, I was shocked to see a wide line of light falling across
the hall floor from the guest room.
When I got into the room, I could see that my worst fears were
confirmed. Fiddle was in the box with the lamb. From the sharp motion
of her head, she was biting. It was probably already too late. I
didn't want to look. But I would have to put her out with her prey --
I didn't want blood and guts on my guest room floor.
As I looked down into the box, Fiddle looked up. Her green eyes were
slitted and she was purring. Her paws were wrapped around the lamb,
who shook her wet, cat-licked ears at me and bleated. At the bleat,
Fiddle turned and took the lamb gently by the neck, as I had seen her
do with her kittens when they wouldn't hold still for washing. Then
she went back to work on the lamb's face and ears.
I waited until she was done, marveling, grateful and sleepily amused.
When the lamb was washed to Fiddle's satisfaction, I gave her the
bottle and tucked her back in. Fiddle curled around her, purring.
"Two points off your predator license, Fiddle," I whispered, stroking
her head. I went back to bed for another snatch of sleep, leaving the
guest room door open.
I named the lamb Viola.
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