Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Dramatis Purrsonae: The Phantom

No picture yet; there's a reason I call her the Phantom. She rarely appears, and only fleetingly then. But I can say she looks very much like Yellow Fellow and is probably related to him (truthfully, I don't know if she's a girl or a boy). She's fooled me a couple of times; I would see what I thought was YF peeking out from under the car but acting so shy and spooky I wondered what was the matter with "him". One of the few advantages to having two feeding stations is that now I have seen there are indeed two of the buff-colored cats, not one, and Yellow isn't losing his marbles or going schizo. Nevertheless, time to dust off a trap and grab her so we can keep the colony at zero population growth. I don't know where she came from, but I surmise there's another few cats living in the area behind this place, and they come and go through the fence.
Meanwhile, the Black is favoring a hind foot. He let me touch it briefly last Sunday; there was blood on one toe but no visible trauma and he was just stepping off of it a bit. Now he's carrying it, and it's puffed up pretty good. He still lets me handle it a bit if I wait till he's eaten some; I eased each claw out with a fingernail and they're all working, bones are intact and I see no wounds on the pads. First hypothesis is a puncture between the pads where it isn't visible, or possibly an insect bite/sting, though I don't know of one that could draw blood. The paw is not noticeably warm, nor are his ears, so if it got infected, he's fought it off.

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