The secret origin of Blondie the feral cat

 

 

Blondie, in typically stealthy feral mode.

Blondie was the first feral cat to show up at my campsite. Way back in 2007. She was only about 6 months old. Still a kitten. I first noticed her mother actually. Who looked just like her. She got hit by a car near my campsite. I noticed her battered body lying by the side of the road.

Then one morning I noticed these three little kittens about 30 yards up the hill from my campsite. They were hiding in the bushes, but periodically their heads would pop up and they would peer down at me with curousity.

I used to throw out a bunch of bread for the blue jays at my campsite every morning. And one morning as I was leaving my campsite, walking down the trail towards the road,  I noticed over my shoulder that the three kittens were slowly creeping down the hill.  It turns out, they had been waiting for me to leave, and then they’d sneak down to my campsite and eat the leftover bread that I had left for the birds.

A couple days later, these people on the Avenue just happened to be handing out free samples of cat food. Of all things.  Which is kind of psychic now that I think about it, that they would happen to be doing that at that exact moment. Because I don’t remember anyone ever handing out free samples of cat food on the Ave before or after that.  But anyways, I grabbed some of the samples. And the next morning, right before I left my campsite, I left some of the cat food for the kittens. So that’s how that started.

I didn’t have a dish to put the cat food in. So I left it on a piece of cardboard.

The next morning I noticed the feral kittens had not only eaten the cat food. They had also eaten big chunks of the cardboard that had been soaked with the cat food gravy. I thought: “These cats must be hungry if they’re eating cardboard.”

So I started leaving cat food for the three kittens every morning. There was Blondie, and her two siblings; a tuxedo cat that I named King Cat (because he was the leader of the pack — though later when I saw him getting fucked by a tom I had to change “his” name to Queen Cat), and a black cat I named Joe Panther.  After awhile they got to the point where they trusted me enough to come down to my campsite and eat the cat food while I was there. They would get within a couple feet of me, and hang out along side me.  But I never touched them or petted them.

The other two cats disappeared about a year later. But Blondie stuck around for the next 10 years. And I fed her just about every day. . .  Blondie disappeared about 2 years ago. But her daughter Moo Cat is still very much with us.