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 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
| Kiwi Kiwi was our first kitten. She came to us as a tiny creature of soft, black fur wrapped around a core of total confidence. She had been discovered in an elevator without any indication of where she might belong. Why we should be chosen to be her caretakers I don’t recall but we loved her from the start. The naming of her was easy. She was, after all, completely midnight black in colouring, bringing to mind the New Zealand rugby team who played in gear of similar persuasion. And so were called the All Blacks. ‘Tis hardly a leap of genius then to cotton to that other name for New Zealanders - the Kiwis. Perhaps it was her colouring that made Kiwi such an excellent hunter. It must surely have been an advantage to be so effectively camouflaged in the darkness of night. The evidence in the form of mice from the fields was produced as tiny gifts to us in the most unexpected of places. I shall never forget the look on my son’s face when he discovered one such token in his Wellington boot. The foot is very sensitive at such times. The type of mouse habitually taken by Kiwi was indicative of her character. She was an athletic little thing, always off outside and hunting in the yard or the fields beyond. And the mice she brought to show us were always beautiful, little, striped ones, never the drab, brown house mice. That was Kiwi, the queen of the great blue yonder, guardian of the garden, and ferocious defender of her patch. I’ve seen her chase off many an inquisitive dog as well as interfering cats from neighbours. Why they were so frightened of her I don’t know, unless it was that wild streak in her that one sensed even when she was accepting the usual feline advantages of being the house cat. There was an enormous confidence about her, as though she were twice her actual size. That is the lesson Kiwi taught us. It’s not size that matters in this business of social hierarchy - it’s confidence. And that was Kiwi. For a long time I thought she was the perfect cat, a mixture of the gentle and the fierce, the domesticated and the wild. And then I met our present cat, Pookie, and a new standard was set. Word count: 392 |
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