Harriet

I dug this picture of Harriet out of some forgotten file on Mason’s old computer. It’s not the best shot, but it’s all I have. About seven years ago, Harriet moved into our house, staying in the basement for a total of six months, appearing in a sweltering southern summer and disappearing again sometime that winter, but she left us with a story that I tell over and over again because it was such an unusual experience, at least for Mace and me. If anyone out there has stories of feral cats or stray dogs moving in, uninvited, please write to me. I’d love to read or post your stories.

Anyway, Harriet was a petite, longhaired calico, peering at us from behind a fuzzy little face that looked flattened by an iron. She was like a feline version of a pug. Her shy glances beamed with gratitude when we’d offer her a bowl of Cat Chow and faucet water. Unlike the Farnival’s heartless feline posse, Harriet’s manner exuded gentleness.

Whenever I touched her, I did it gingerly, afraid to scare her off, but as we got more comfortable with each other, she let me pet her for longer periods of time. She was too thin, but she never finished a whole bowl of food. After she had her fill, she’d needle her dainty paws against the warm brick steps, mewing in appreciation.

She appeared first and every time afterward at the tree line east of the house, waiting near the gray trunk of a sugar maple or the brown bark of a fir tree, her fur blending into both hues, for a sighting of Mace or me. When she saw us, she’d prance across the yard with a pleased expression in her gold eyes. For maybe a month, she never ventured past the front porch, mainly because my cats, all neutered and male, smacked the poop out of her every time she turned the corner.

Overall, she showed up so infrequently that if days went by without a Harriet sighting, we didn’t worry about it. She could have been anyone or no one’s cat. But whenever Mace or I saw her, we’d report her appearance, appetite, and general disposition like it was important household news.

For a while we called her Harry, assuming she was male, until, with disbelief, I noticed her mushrooming stomach and swelling nipples and realized that Harry was a Harriet. We took her to Dr. Dan, our country vet, who said he could spay her, but explained it would kill the litter, which he could already feel squirming. We decided against it.

Not long after I discovered her gender, Harriet somehow crept past my feline posse and moved herself, uninvited, into our basement through the doggie door, nesting in the frame of an old couch and delivered a litter of six kittens. As soon as the kittens were big enough to crawl outside the safety of the couch frame, Lucy, our German shepherd, killed all of them while our pet sitter slept upstairs. We had seen Lucy kill both moles and opossums with one snap of her powerful maw, but back then we were naïve when it came to animal behavior and assumed Lucy could somehow distinguish kittens from mice.

Another hard lesson that Harriet taught us was that cats are able to go back into heat a week or less after giving birth. Needless to say, sixty days later, when Harriet delivered her second litter, we built her kittens a fortress that kept them safe until we could find them homes.

Accepting the fact that Harriet was our responsibility whether we wanted it or not, we took her to the Robertson County Animal Clinic and got her on antibiotics, spayed, dewormed, and vaccinated. Because she had made it into the basement, Boo and Goo treated her with contempt instead of brutality, so her life among the pack became somewhat easier.

To Harriet’s credit, she stuck around for a few months, sleeping, eating, and resting, putting on a little weight but bearing the same gracious, gentle face she had arrived here wearing. After she felt better, she would venture out into the woods for days, then weeks. The last time I waited for a month before the fact that she was never coming back dawned. Mason waited longer than I did, sitting on the steps after he had finished his smoke, staring into the tree line for a Harriet sighting, but there was never anything to report. She just disappeared.

P.S. Our buddy, Peacock, adopted Amos, one of the kittens from Harriet’s second litter. Amos is still alive and well in Tallahassee, Florida.