Southwest Sierra #119 – Cats

This week’s article is all about cats. The story starts around 1994 when our son Wyatt was about nine years old. A couple named Birdie and Susan lived in the house that Don McCloud III built in the 1980s (near the McDonalds sign that currently hangs in a tree in Alleghany). Susan and Birdie’s cat had a litter of kittens and Wyatt was up there every day, playing with the kittens. Naturally, he wanted one. My husband David is strictly a dog person, and he was very firm with his “no” answer. I knew how stubborn he can be and wasn’t about to argue the case. This was during the time that we lived in the little shack on Miners Street next to my parent’s house. On the weekends we stayed with David’s recently widowed mother in Nevada City.

One weekend, my mother-in-law Irene overheard Wyatt begging for a kitten. She got the “stubborn Irene” look on her face and exclaimed: “Your father CANNOT tell you that you can’t have a kitten! When he was a little boy, he and Billy were always bringing kittens home! You just go right over there and get yourself a kitten!” [Evidently the Old Downieville Hwy in Nevada City was the place to dump unwanted kittens in the 1960s.]

Immediately upon our return to Alleghany Wyatt and I went to Birdie and Susan’s house so he could get his kitten. (He had already chosen one.) Susan was happy to see us. We watched as Wyatt reached into the box and picked up his kitten. It rolled out of his hands as he tried to hold it against his chest. He managed not to drop it and exclaimed: “He’s Rolly!” and Rolly Polly [long “o” sound] was named on the spot. The kitten settled into our home nicely and Java our dog was gentle with it. It slept on Wyatt’s bed and all was fine until the weekend came and it was time to go to Nevada City for two nights. It was summertime and we left the kitten with food and water and the back door cracked so that it could get in and out. We asked my dad to keep an eye on it. Wyatt did not want to leave the kitten, but we assured him that it would be fine.

When we got back to Alleghany the following Sunday afternoon the kitten was nowhere to be found. We felt terrible. We thought for sure that it would show up, but first one week, then another went by. Susan still had a few kittens left but she was getting ready to take them to the pound. We let Wyatt get another one and our son Tahoe named it “Tinker”. It was black with a tiny white dot on its chest just like Rolly. This time, we locked Tinker in the house when we left for the weekend and a month went by without incident.

Six-weeks after Rolly’s disappearance, I was walking down Miners Street towards our cabin when I saw “Tinker” at the cabin two houses away from our place. “What are you doing way up here Tinker?” I asked as I picked him up and carried him home. When I opened the cabin door I was so surprised to see Tinker safe at home! It was Rolly! The two kittens immediately started playing with each other. After that, I realized that it is best to get kittens in pairs because they have so much fun!

I walked back to the house where I found Rolly and knocked on the door. The house belonged to the Gold Crown Mine and wasn’t inhabited full-time, but there was a vehicle in the driveway. I asked if they knew anything about the kitten. It turned out that they had showed up the weekend that we left Rolly at home alone and assumed that he was abandoned. They decided to take him home to the Bay Area with them with plans to bring him back to Alleghany to be a “mine cat” when he got bigger.

Both kittens made it to adulthood, but one day I noticed that Tinker was sitting in a position that told me he was having trouble breathing. We took him to the vet who encouraged us to put him down. He said that his lungs were full of puss. Rolly was now our only cat, and he moved with us from the cabin on Miners Street to the Hope House.

To be continued...