Let nature take its course

On 7 August 2009 we finally managed to get hold of a very small cat, so small it hardly deserved that name, which up to that day had earned a living by scrounging at dinner tables in a village not so far from here.
We were looking for an outdoor cat to keep the mouse and mole population at bay, our friends in Vaux had more than enough wild cats roaming around their house, and that same evening we became the proud owners of a very young cat.
How old she was we did not know, but we guessed she must have been roughly 8 weeks old then. Even though Fifi has grown a lot since, she is still a very small cat given her age.
Recently she started to put on a lot of weight, which more or less coincided with the sighting of an orange-red cat on the premises. This cat seemed very at ease in the courtyard, not being bothered by Fifi, which made us think that this well could have been one of the 3 cats which were born here early May 2008.



Our first thought was that Fifi had been scoffing too many mice, but slowly we started to put Fifi (one) and the red cat (one) together, and the fact that Fifi had not been “done” yet made us think that she could well be pregnant. One evening something unusual happened. Fifi was not to be found in her usual hang outs, like in her own cave, or in the roof of the toilet block for the camp site, but she had draped herself on the doormat in front of our front door, and she certainly did not feel at ease. She even did not make one attempt to slip inside as soon as we opened the door to see how she was. At the end of the evening we decided to sit with her for a while, and finally managed to get her down to her own dwelling, and in her bed lined with her favourite blanket. Around midnight she was the proud but tired mother of two, and the next morning we found out that she had had a litter of four. In the mean time we are looking for a vet, because, however nice these young cats may turn out to be, five cats on the premises could well be more than enough!

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