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The clerk is an employee who probably doesn't make too much. But he was thrilled to have a cat.
Buckie is sitting on my lap as type this. He was one of four feral kittens I coaxed into the house last year. I've turned Jefazo out, who was being more of a nuisance than he was worth. Desperado doesn't get it, either. He keeps away from me even when I'm chasing him with an open can of tuna. He would have been turned out some time ago, but he's not that much trouble. He's next on the neutering list and then he will be released. Buckie was the first one to get it. He adopted me less than a month after coming into the house. He is fed and kept warm and all he has to do is kiss my ass and let me pet him. Spitfire, the lone female of that litter, was the last of the four to regularly hiss at me. The only time she does that now is after delivering a litter of kittens, which she has done twice: once in June and again in September. The June litter was six in number, but three of them died within a week of each other when they were about a month old. I took them to the vet and found that they were being sucked dry by fleas. The survivors were given baths two or three times a day for a month. The September litter had nine, and I didn't know a litter could have so many. Two died within days and three more followed before they were a month old. I lost another earlier this week. I don't get upset over the really small ones dying; Nature gave queens the ability to give birth to a half-dozen or so kittens about three times a year for several years in order for two of them to live long enough to reproduce themselves, thus keeping the population stable. However, the last one, a black female, was getting a little old not to care about.
Being an ardent anti-establishment romantic, I often give the cats anti-establishment or romantic names. Yes, Pancho is for Pancho Villa; Moro is Spanish for Moor; Swashbuckler, a son of Buccaneer, is self-explanitory. The seven-week old kittens are named for: Reynard the Fox, an evil but clever and colorful character of German folklore; Bandit is just an occupational name, like his father, Buccaneer; and Phoolan Devi, the late twentieth-century bandit queen of India (she is also a child of Buckie's).
In addition, Buckie and Spitfire also have four feral brothers and sisters who know where to get food. They are Flash Gordon, John Carter (after Edgar Rice Burroughs' explorer of Mars), Calico Jack (for a seventeenth-century pirate) and La Negra.
The mother/grandmother of all of the above was Pinta, a gray and white queen who was about three years old. The markings on her coat reminded me of a pinto pony. Pinta disappeared late this summer after introducing me to her last litter, which appears to have been born in March or April. I suppose she met some grusome end under a car, at the jaws of the neighbors' pit bull or perhaps getting trapped in a garbage can and taken to the dump.
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