Attic Orphans

Years ago I had a tortoise shell cat. It's been so long, I can't remember her name. She was a stray that I took in, and she got pregnant pretty fast. She had 3 kittens, two tortoise shells like herself, and a gold tiger male. Their nursery was a spare bedroom in my house.

One day I stopped at a friends house. They weren't home, but their mom was, so I sat at her kitchen table with her and chatted. I noticed an occasional little noise and asked her what in the world WAS that?

She told me that her cat had had kittens in her attic. She thought her cat had been killed on the road a day or two ago. She said "the poor things, they just cry and I don't know what to do about it?"

Well, I brushed my irritation away because that wouldn't help, I had to get those babies some care. I asked the woman how to get into the attic and she told me there was no easy way, and she pointed to a place on the ceiling where there was a square like a window on the ceiling. This turned out to be one of those staircases Chevy Chase encounters in his Christmas Vacation movie. I had to stand on a chair to reach a handle, and pull down. A ladder was folded up into this contraption, so I unfolded it out into the room, steadied myself and headed up.

It didn't take long to find two little gray tiger kittens. I scooped them up and came back down. They were tiny and weak. Their eyes were sunk in, everything was sunk in. They were badly dehydrated. They were about 3 weeks old, just a bit younger than my kittens at home. We couldn't figure out how the mother cat had gotten up there, but it didn't matter now.

I drove home and took the orphans into the bedroom. The mama cat was asleep with her babies. She ignored me when I walked in, so I just carefully laid each baby close to her nipples. The babies dove in. I sat down and watched for a long time. Finally the mama woke up, looked down, sniffed a couple times and started licking them both with vigor. By that evening their little tummies were round, and they had picked up energy. They would would survive! I was SO relieved!

I don't have a picture of those babies, so I've added a picture of my cat Danny. My husband found her in the alley during a bad windstorm a day before my birthday, so I called her my birthday present from him. Then he couldn't say we had to find a home for her. haha