Unusually Bad For His Size

Unusually Bad For His Size

Loki was getting walked regularly, I had one part-time job working at Hastings and was also doing adjunct History teaching at MSU-B and life was in something of a routine, when, for my birthday in 2001, Laurel gave me the worst present that could have happened to Mallory.

We went to the pound.  In deference to Mallory actually, I was looking for a male kitten, labouring under the false belief that he would be the most likely to get along well with her.  I don't think she ever believed me when I tried to explain that.  His first attempt to befriend her ended up with his head bleeding slightly, but that was almost the only time she was able to establish that she was in charge.  Everyone else in the house accepted that she was the alpha,[1] he, did not.

But before that, there came the actual picking out.  There was only one cage with male kittens innit.  I’d always wanted another Siamese and in this cage were three kittens.  A matched pair of Siamese curled up together, not feeling like they needed to pay any attention to me and gray and black striped one who reached up to the doors to get my attention.  He was more interested me than they were, plus, I thought they had a fairly good chance of getting adopted as a pair and I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving him alone in the cage.

So he came home with me.  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have tried to cuddle him so much at the start, but I had forgotten about very new kittens who get shocked into a new environment.  I blame this for the fact that to this day he feels being picked up or cuddled to be an assault on his person and some of the worst torture he’s ever undergone. [2]

Because of the other denizens of the rented duplex we lived in in Billings, I took him into my room before I let him out of the box the pound gave me.  I was trying to get him used to me and find a name.  I’ve always wanted to name a cat Sherlock, but as anyone who’s ever tried to impose a name on a cat knows, this is pointless. I finally gave up and lay still on the floor to stop scaring him.             `

I dozed off, as I am wont to do pretty much any time I hold still for more than a few minutes and had a dream I can’t remember about Sleepy Hollow[3].  Thus, my future scaredy-cat got the name Ichabod, which, much to my original chagrin, I’d forgotten had been the designation of a couple of cats who’d belonged to my aunt, uncle and cousins[4] but I overcame my lack of originality and the name has proved quite appropriate.

While he was confined to my room for the night for the first month he lived with us, after a day or so, I let him out into the house.  This lead to both the first altercation with Mallory and unremitting (and mostly unrequited) affection for Loki. 

One of Ichabod’s very early actions was to crawl up onto the couch where Loki was curled up asleep, not bothering anyone and snuggle.[5] His preferred position was up against her stomach, just below her ribcage.  Being Loki and having a strong sense of pack responsibility, she put up with this.   She didn’t entirely care for it, but she put up with it and even made use of the time.  For quite some time, when I’d take him to the vet, I’d get complimented on how clean his ears were.

Except when he tried to nurse.  You could always tell when that was happening, after the first time.  They’d be lying there, Ichabod blissfully, Loki resigned.  Then he’d start a furious kitten purr, she’d yelp and he’d go flying off the couch.  This never deterred him for long. Even the time when I was writing a lecture with Loki’s head pressed up against my thigh and Ichabod in his favourite position, and she suddenly snarled and chased him up into lap only kept him away for a minute or two.  He lives in the perfect faith that she will never hurt him.

Which seems to be proved out, as his relationship with Mallory took a similar line.  Well, sort of.

He wanted to be friends with her and tried to snuggle and play and she, by virtue of the age difference and a much less social personality when it comes to animals, didn’t.  Or if she did, he’d rapidly get too rough.  Loki would inevitably rush in to intervene.  And inevitably chase Mallory away as if she were the offending party. There is some evidence that when left alone without witnesses, they were able to play with each other without it resulting in bloodshed, but Mallory refuses to admit to this and we have no actual proof.

The fact that he outweighed her in short order didn’t especially help Mallory’s situation. 

This is not to imply that he is 100% awful.  Just about 75%.  I judge it to be more a clash of personalities. He is very social with other animals, befriending cats in both areas where we have lived and other dogs that have come into our home.  Mallory loves people, but not so much other beings with fur and four legs.  I even have photos of him stealth cuddling with her.

Stealth cuddling is positioning himself next to Mallory or Loki or Molly and slowly, veeerrry slowly reaching out one a paw until he’s touching them without being noticed.  Sometimes he’ll even manage full body contact.  This usually happens when they’re asleep and lasts until someone wakes up and hijinks ensue.

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[1] Several years later, our mother was making disparaging comments on the level of training the dogs had and asked, “Who’s in charge in this house?”  Spontaneously and simultaneously, Laurel and I both said, “Mallory.”  More on this later.

[2] After 12 years I’ve Stockholmed him into believing that this is actually acceptable behaviour on my part and he will actually purr and cuddle for up to a minute.  Sometimes he will even purr and cuddle while trying to get away. 

[3] Apropos of nothing, my friend Brian Jay Jones (not the Rolling Stone) wrote a very excellent book on Washington Irving, which has a little bit, about this tale in.

[4] Another writer friend of mine, the underappreciated Jerry Oltion, recalled having my cousin Jerry Jolley(an underappreciated some-time radio DJ) “have to get home and feed Ichabod before he pees on the stove.”

[5] This is to be distinguished from cuddling in that A) he initiates it in typical cat fashion, i.e. total disregard for what anyone else might want B) he is no way, shape or form, confined.

And Vermin

It all started when I moved in with my sister at 32.  I was 32, she 27, but because she’s more mature and generally better at trivial things like being responsible, finding gainful employment, doing yard work and not eating double cheeseburgers at 2 a.m., people tend to think she’s older when I start talking about her.   Once they meet her, they realize she’s both younger and cuter, but, as there’s no guarantee anyone reading this knows her, I wanted to set the record straight right off the bat.  Maturity and age are not necessarily equal in our lives.

It actually probably started a few years earlier than that, but this is more or less where I came into it.  On the other hand, as all history is personal, I should begin at the beginning. However, as has been said more than once, a beginning is a perilous thing, or at least very tricky to determine.

I wasn’t totally a stranger to her pets at that time.  There are scattered moments from earlier years.  My senile, fading maternal grandmother resenting “the puppy” because cute, little, new, present-from-an-ex-boyfriend-Loki took attention away from “her” dog – the sweet dachapoo with the IQ of a radish who loved her and visited her at the nursing home and also took umbrage at a new dog’s ingress into our home that Christmas.  It was bad enough that when her mommy came she brought two more cats, now a puppy came too.

I remember that same puppy, exhausted from all the love, attention, cuddling and umbrage, taking refuge by my father’s feet, two shoes the same size she was, away from the selfsame dachapoo.  He was the only one not paying her an excess of attention, positive or negative and even when a full-grown 65 pounds and somewhat larger than his shoes, he remained her second favourite person in the whole world.

I remember Mickey and Mallory at Christmases as well:  Laurel’s cats, brother and sister named after the characters in Natural Born Killers.  Because of the pet flap in the house, visiting cats tend to get relegated to basement so that they don’t find themselves lost in the teeming urban tangle of Thermopolis, Wyoming’s city streets.[1] Mallory would huddle in her cat house or on anyone who was downstairs watching TV, Mickey’s face could often be found sticking out of the sleeping bags, suitcases and soup cans on the shelves in the pantry.    Mickey too left the world far too soon, but at age 13, when my sister moved in with the man she loved[2] Mallory immediately became queen of the castle, down to Roland figuring out which nature shows she liked best.[3]

Where do you begin when they’ve been part of your life all your life more or less – and those times they haven’t been aren’t really worth counting are they?  Nor do they come in discrete sections either, they tend to overlap and overflow and meld into one another.[4] 

Pug, scared of pretty much everything you could see and several things you couldn’t, but was willing to fight to be able to lie on your neck and suck your ear while you slept. 

Ebony who survived sneaking an entire box of fudge off the kitchen table one Christmas and out into the kennel where it lay empty and snow-covered until the spring thaw.

Who, the reason for all the electric mats that dotted our house for years as well as the smell that still makes itself known in the office now and then and who chose my mother to love and adore despite an initial mutual dislike.

Percy, who was smarter than all of us, who figured out doorknobs but lacked thumbs and who decided he had a summer home at the house across the alley once I went off to college. 

Do stories begin at the beginning of our lives?  The pictures of my first cat Harry lying next to me on a blanket, sucking on my bottle? Do I start with all those smatterings of from an ever dimmer and more distant childhood?  Harry’s death when I was 10, probably of feline leukemia before anyone really knew what it was; tailless Belle (unneutered male cats don’t always take “I’m fixed” for an answer) who was generally scared of strangers, unerringly making for the laps of my grandmother and cousin Robert, both inveterate cat haters; Belle watching impassively while Sylvester, only with us a short time tried to kill a stuffed rabbit one of us had gotten for Easter.

But where do you stop starting?  Because it could go even farther back than that.  To stories the parents have told about their own lives, you wind up tracking all the way back down to wolves breeding into dogs in a single generation for food and a seat by the fire in a hunting camp and to cats apparently letting themselves be domesticated in the sands of Egypt.

So, as I said, this begins, for me, when I moved in with my sister, her dog Loki and cat Mallory.  They were both happy to have me around, another person to feed pet and play with them.  Mallory slept on my bed the first few nights I was there, establishing ownership upon my person.  Loki, though, had some issues expressing herself.

The first time Laurel and I went out to a movie or dinner – the backyard was unfenced, and while there was a kennel setup, we tended to leave her inside when we went out at night – we came home and she’d chewed up one or more something’s of mine including taking the head off a Christmas decoration.  The second time we went out, I made sure to put away anything chewable, even to the books I’d been using to pretend to do research for a still unfinished Ph.D. thesis. 

I’d left out a digital travel alarm clock that I used to try to motivate myself.  Or something, like I said, it was a while back and the thesis never got written.  This hard plastic clock bore tooth prints to the day it died.  From the position of my calculator, she’d made a try at it too.

After I’d been there a few months, as long as something didn’t resemble one of her stuffed toys, I could leave it within reach.  The best theory we could come up with was that she’d get restless when left alone and my possessions, after being in Newfoundland, Canada and then Thermopolis, Wyoming in the months before I settled with them in Billings, smelled funny and needed to be chewed on.  Somehow, it all must have merged into the “correct” scent of the home and were only at risk if they looked like something that might squeak if teeth were sunk into it.

Having very sporadic employment, (a degree in Folklore is an amazing and versatile thing that covers fields like English, History, Social Science, the medical profession and many other things.  The trick is convincing anyone to hire you.  Some of my colleagues are very good at this, for whatever reason, I am not) I spent a lot of time walking Loki.  This was always an interesting experience as most of her effective training had been done by two much larger dogs who helped raise her as a puppy, and while, at 65 pounds, she wasn’t a tiny dog, her tendency to try to prove her superiority over other dogs did not discriminate as to size.  Which left me at least once lying in the dirt trying to find my glasses while the owner of two mastiff-husky mixes that Loki had bitten through her mouth harness to attack managed to keep them from eating her.   If I fell on my own, she’d stay by my side until I got moving again, this concern did not extend to when she was the cause of my being prone.

 Sporadic efforts at training had some degree of effectiveness, but neither of us was sufficiently good at carrying through – Laurel was better than I, but she was also the one who went running with her dog on at least a weekly basis – for it to have the impact we would have liked.  Plus, it had all gotten started after she was 3 years old and had some ingrained patterns.  That we probably could have broken if we’d been really consistent.

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[1] It is not where Superman lives and it does actually exist.

[2] Mallory was 13, Laurel was, somewhat, older than that.

[3] Winged Migration.

[4] As I write Molly is chasing Ichabod around the living room and appealing to me for help every time he gets too above or too under something for her get to.