Sunday afternoons mom would cook chicken. We would take the bones, fat, and skin out to the cats as a snack. Most of the litters and batches of cats we had would be patient enough to wait for us to set the treats down. But there was this one batch of cats that went completely nuts, you had to be careful when you fed them. They knew when Sunday came around. They could also hear us approaching the back door. You could literally see the door shake with their bodies slamming against it. You had to be tricky and careful when you opened the door as those cats would climb your body to be the first to get to the yummy stuff. If you timed it just right, you could open the door, throw out the treats, and slam the door quick and avoid becoming a climbing post. After a few moments, it was safe to go out and watch the cats growl and fight over the food. Highly entertaining to watch. You'd think those cats were starved by the way they acted. Truth be known, they were some of the best fed cats on the block. Plenty of mice, birds, and gophers to catch and eat and we fed them cat food as well.
One year we had a batch of kittens that loved to eat grasshoppers. We had them trained quite well to go on walks with us. We would catch the grasshoppers, pull off the hoppers and give them to the cats to eat. It was fun to go on those walks with a trail of five or six cats all waiting for their grasshopper treats. We had one cat that would catch and eat gophers. That was an impressive sight to behold. I always thought it was fun to watch a cat sneak up on a bird and be able to catch it in mid take off. Some people are horrified at the thought of cats doing what comes so naturally to them. But out on our acre of yard, we had many different kinds of fruit trees and a garden. Those silly Starling birds would eat all of our crops before we would ever get a chance to harvest. It's frustrating to go out and pick cherries and have to throw the majority of them away because they've been pecked by birds. The cats were so helpful to keep the bird population down and allow us to enjoy some of the fruit we had labored so hard to tend and grow. There was one year we had a batch of cats that recognized the B.B. gun. My older brother would go out into the yard to shoot down the birds and he would have a trail of cats hot on his heels, anxious to have a bird feast.
And the names we would give to the cats. We weren't the kind of people to name our cats anything usual. They were always given names that either fit their personality or that fit their colorings and markings. We had a cat named punctuation mark, punky for short. He was all white except for this one black spot on his head that looked like a punctuation mark. We had a cat named French Fry. She was an all black cat and I had wanted to name her Jasmine or something like that. My brothers said that if I named her that, they would call her potato. I said if they called her potato I would call her French Fry....the name stuck. We had a cat named Pockets, because we had him neutered, my mom said his pockets had been picked. I had a cat named Moo. When he meowed he sounded like a cow. A cat named three as I had bought her at 3:15 in the afternoon. My parents until recently had a cat named Speed Bump. She had a habit of lying in the middle of the floor like a speed bump. Before we moved away from Pine Canyon we had a cat named, Squish you flat. That cat liked to sleep on the top of the car tires. My mom was always afraid that we would squish it flat. My current cat is named Popcorn. When she was a kitten, she was this fluffy white ball of fur, and I thought she looked like a big fluffy popcorn kernel.
