Feral

The traditional thing to do for a slice of the population at this time of year is to pack up and shift to Arizona, Mexico or anywhere that doesn’t involve snow except maybe at the highest peaks where you don’t plan to spend much time anyway; anyplace where it is unlikely to find frost on window panes in the morning. If the place has a sandy beach and serves great margaritas, well, you might consider putting a check mark beside those features listed in column A. I should add a caveat here, as insurance companies will no longer guarantee the attributes mentioned above, so forget about a refund if weather doesn’t go your way and if the margaritas are no hell. Also I imagine by now that tourism literature has added qualifiers at the bottom of grand poster-size images of people having carefree fun in the sun. The small print is similar to that on cereal boxes that state that the product as shown is larger than actual size. Not sure about you, but I’ve never believed that corn flakes were the size of baseball gloves as pictured on the box and therefore I have never been let down when the box is opened and flakes fall into a bowl.

All of the above is a good thing, but mostly I like to herald what I like to call the ‘hunkering down’ crowd that inhabits the Great White North; hunkering down holds somewhat of a different meaning on halcyon days of sunlight and colour of October than say, days of hard rain in late November and then again the last week of January, where you are hardened to winter and can no longer remember much about summer and have forgotten what spring feels like and you just hope that the promises of the seed catalogues are assured to happen—or do they also now have small print explaining that their images are bigger than life.

Easy to miss the obvious changes in the air right now having to rake the leaves, which, come to think, they do sound like corn flakes after all. So, it only takes an amount of focus, something I often run a little dry on, to note that the alpacas at the farm are growing heavy coats of wool and it’s not just a fashion thing; and the hens are laying less, now with shortened daylight; and it’s dark out when the big yellow school bus travels down my road.

Around my place a different signal has been made obvious. Down here by Slab Creek there is a growing population of feral cats; the dictionary says that many things are essentially feral, like birds and plants; if the word means untameable, that fits the description of the felines that hang about my place. I should say young cats, more or less teenagers rather than kittens, but they amuse themselves just like any fluffy kitten in an ad for toilet paper.

At first there was one that would make itself apparent and stare me down with the message of hunger. No one wants to see anything or anyone go hungry; but I like to feed the birds as well, and have several feeders on the go; hence the conundrum. By feeding the cat, does that lessen the threat of the birds becoming a meal or does it make it worse by attracting more predators. I haven’t quite figured this one out, but know the blue jays are quick to let everyone know when birdlife is in peril as they sound the alarm to rat-out on cats on the prowl.

But it seems that Cat 1 has been doing reconnaissance and has reported back to brothers and sisters. Soon Cat 2 appeared; okay so I’ll now confess that Cat 3 arrived yesterday and the pressure is on when grocery shopping to not avoid the pet food aisle. I won’t be taken in by their ploy and therefore haven’t named them. Instead, referring to them numerically lessens the emotional draw to how beautiful and cautious and catlike they are. So maybe Cat 1, Cat 2 and Cat 3 might become friendly faces through the winter with no demands other than being fed. Unless of course they get a hint of me, their adopted food supplier, enjoying the warmth of a wood stove; Then, for sure, that will have to be a whole other conversation on where to draw the line on the status of being feral.