Spooky

Amber was the most unusual cat of her litter. While most of her littermates were variations on the standard ("mackerel") gray Tabby, Amber was a bright golden color with brown stripes. Very easy to spot. Not a good survival trait for a feral cat. So we took her in. (And because she turned out to actually be a she, we were glad to have removed another breeder from the mix.)

One of her littermates wasn't a gray Tabby. It was a black kitten with an unsettling habit of letting you get very close to it - as long as you were approaching from behind. As soon as it saw you, it would run away, or at least out of reach. It also didn't seem to respond to noises - just visual cues. It was also smaller than the gray Tabbies, which led me to assume that it was a female.

On January 1 of this year I caught the black kitten. Barehanded, while it was sleeping. In retrospect, I probably should have been wearing leather gloves, and a leather apron.

We quickly determined that she was actually a he, and that he wasn't hard-of-hearing at all. But we had him.

He gave us a bit of a scare on his first vet's visit, when he tested weakly positive for the virus that is known (somewhat misleadingly) as "feline leukemia." We had kept him strictly isolated from the other cats, even his sister Amber, and had always washed thoroughly after handling him, so we weren't too concerned with contagion. A more sophisticated and sensitive (and expensive) test came back negative.

We had no idea what to call him in those early days. My mom suggested various precious names, which I shot down. I took to calling him Little Black Cat, or LBC for short. In the end my mom decided on the name Spooky - a name once borne by another black cat, a feral without fear who was last seen about about a year ago. When I last saw him, SpookyBear (the "Bear" part came from one of my nephews) was very bedraggled, but there was no question of taking him into the house.

The younger Spooky has absolutely stretched the limits of how old a feral kitten can be when it is first taken into a house. He was fine in isolation, perfectly comfortable in the company of humans, but when released into the larger house his first act was to hide - very effectively. He did interact freely with the other cats in the house, but he avoided any contact with the resident humans. It has only been in the last week or so that I have been able to pet him and hold him without having him run away.

The original SpookyBear received his name because he had a "spooky" habit of sitting still and staring at any approaching humans while his littermates ran away - he would only retreat when you were almost within touching distance. BlueBear was named for his blue eyes (which faded as he got older) with the "Bear" part tacked on in memory of SpookyBear. (BlueBear is now about as big as Nicky - at less than a year old, he could easily be mistaken for a small panther.)

The new Spooky is definitely his own animal, with his own unique traits, and an odd look about him - eyes that tend to have the lids down to the top of the pupil, giving his a suspicious and skeptical look at all times, and a head that is much wider across the upper portion than the lower. Maybe this is just the awkward adolescent stage - at one point Bowie looked less like a cat and more like some sort of bizarre alien creature, long-legged and spectrally thin with skin stretched taught across her frame. We will see how Spooky develops over the coming months.