The Mostly True Story of Pudding Tat, Adventuring Cat

by Caroline Adderson

  Copyright © 2019 by Caroline Adderson

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2019 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit

  www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  groundwoodbooks.com

  We gratefully acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Adderson, Caroline, author

  The mostly true story of Pudding Tat, adventuring cat / Caroline Adderson ; illustrations by Stacy Innerst.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55498-964-5 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-55498-966-9 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-55498-967-6 (Kindle)

  I. Innerst, Stacy, illustrator II. Title. III. Title: Pudding Tat, adventuring cat.

  PS8551.D3267M67 2019 jC813'.54 C2018-903795-4

  C2018-903796-2

  Illustrations by Stacy Innerst

  Design by Michael Solomon

  This book is in memory of Sheila Barry,

  the first to believe in this little cat.

  Parasitism: The relationship between two living things in which one of them — the parasite — lives off a host.

  Symbiosis: The relationship between two living things in which both help and benefit each other.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Welland County, Ontario, Canada, 1901

  2. Niagara Fall, Ontario, Canada 1901

  3. Buffalo, New York, 1901

  4. New York City, 1901

  5. Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1910

  6. RMS Titanic, 1912

  7. The Western Front, 1914

  8. Welland County, Ontario, Canada, 1915

  Author’s Note

  Pudding Tat’s Playlist

  About the Author

  1. Welland County, Ontario, Canada, 1901

  This is the mostly true story of Pudding Tat, much-traveled cat, whose adventuring life began in the first year of a new and promising century. Not ours, but one long ago.

  Pudding was born in a hayloft where the heat from the horses and cows rose and warmed the night. To the lullaby of laughing whinnies and quiet, sweet-breathed moos, his mother added her contented purring. Mother Tat was so pleased with her latest batch of kittens. Two black, one gray, one tabby, and the curious white one she called Pudding.

  Pudding Tat. Through the years he would stand out in many ways, but most obviously for being the color of the dessert he was named after — milk boiled with sugar and a pinch of salt, with cornstarch to thicken it. The special treat that Farmer Willoughby brought to the barn on Christmas Day every year.

  For more than a week Mother Tat’s helpless kittens wriggled beside her, blind, deaf and toothless, their mews silent. Then at last they opened their watery eyes and looked around the dim old barn on the Willoughby farm.

  In this, Pudding was different, too. His eyes didn’t open. Even so, he was the first of the squirming, nuzzling kittens to attempt to stand. No sooner had he got up on all fours than one leg trembled and gave way, and he toppled back into the hay. He didn’t give up. He tried again on his four white wobbly legs.

  Eventually, he succeeded. They all did, and grew sturdy.

  Soon they were tumbling over each other, taking a few daring steps away from Mother Tat before rushing back. They were not very brave — except for Pudding. Despite his closed eyes, Pudding would wander away from Mother Tat and just stand there listening to the captivating sounds of the world. The buzz-huff-hum-twitter-thrum-scratch-squeak.

  “Open your eyes, Pudding,” Mother Tat urged.

  He could open them now, but preferred not to, which was strange. They were beautiful eyes, as pink as his tongue. His brothers’ and sisters’ eyes, meanwhile, had changed from blue to green or amber.

  During the day, the sun would beam through the cracks around the hayloft doors, revealing the dust and spider tapestries and long hammocks of cobwebs. Then Pudding would blink violently and shrink back. At night he was more comfortable, but he still couldn’t see well. He recognized the black void that marked the edge of the hayloft, but he couldn’t tell how far away it was.

  How would he ever catch mice, Mother Tat worried when the kittens were ready to learn. She was an excellent mouser. An excellent teacher, too. While she’d been nursing her kittens, the mice had taken advantage of the peace and produced their own babies. Mice that were just peaking in plumpness and overrunning the barn.

  This was how Mother Tat went about their lessons.

  First, she killed a mouse herself and divided it into five equal parts to give the kittens a taste of fresh mouse meat. Other than their special treat at Christmas, the barn cats never ate human food. From their very first taste they longed only for raw mouse — bone-in, with the fur still on it.

  Next, Mother Tat lined up her kittens in the hay. She caught a mouse, then opened the trap of her jaws. Off it shot, the kittens bounding after it. Pudding, too, though he was always in the rear, following his brothers and sisters.

  One kitten got hold of the tail, but the mouse jerked free. They swarmed it.

  “Very good,” Mother Tat cried. “Well done!”

  The mouse escaped. Mother Tat caught it again and divided it up as a reward for her five talented children.

  After a few days of this, Mother Tat began to tutor each of her kittens separately. All of them progressed more or less as well as her previous litters. Except for Pudding. Without his brothers and sisters to follow, Pudding used a different method. He couldn’t rely on his eyes. Instead, when Mother Tat released the mouse, he sat and listened.

  Mother Tat wondered why he was giving the mouse a head start.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked.

  There. Pudding picked out the sound he needed. A tiny mouse heart beating. He dashed for it but, misjudging the distance, ran straight into the hayloft wall. The mouse escaped. Pudding rubbed his stinging nose with his paw.

  It pained Mother Tat to see Pudding fail like this again and again. He was hopeless! If he couldn’t catch mice in the barn where they were plentiful, how would he manage in the wide world? Would he even get the chance? A fox would spot a white cat a mile away. Or he’d fall into the river and drown.

  But she kept these fears to herself and, hoping for the best, continued to encourage him.

  Hunting was just one skill Mother Tat taught her children. They would need so much more if they were to survive. She taught them the signs of an approaching storm: red-sky mornings, aching bones. She taught them never to walk behind a horse, but always in front. She’d lost her own brother, their Uncle Tat, when he was kicked by a startled plow horse. She taught them not to go anywhere near cart wheels, or the long blade of Farmer Willoughby’s scythe. She showed them the scythe hanging on the barn wall — a terrifying implement that smelled of oil and new-mown hay.

  Stay away from humans altogether, she warned. Just in case one had a sack tucked inside his coat. She’d learned from her own mother, who had learned from he
rs, about farmers loading kittens into a sack for drowning. Yes, they drowned kittens if they thought there were too many cats in the barn.

  Her favorite lesson, though, was when she taught them to wash. How delightful to see all five Tat kittens in a row, their pink tongues combing their fur. This was the one thing Pudding was good at, so Mother Tat made sure to praise him for it.

  “Between the toes, like Pudding. Between the toes.”

  Thanks to her guidance and love, the kittens thrived. Their legs got leggy and their tails got taily. They were always clean. Now they hunted everything — mice, spiders, the swallows that plastered their mud nests against the rafters of the barn. (They did not have much success with swallows.) They hunted each other. They were mighty hunters of the Great Race of Tats!

  Soon they were confident enough to leave the loft and go exploring. Pudding, too, went bumbling after them.

  “Go. Take chances,” Mother Tat told them as she shooed them out. But to Pudding she always whispered, “Be careful.”

  The whole barn was theirs to explore now. The kittens leapt from the loft’s sudden edge to a shelf in the milking parlor, from the shelf to the top of a stall, and from the stall to the floor. Pudding fearlessly followed his brothers and sisters by scent and sound. If it was night and safe to open his eyes, he trailed behind their shadowy forms.

  Mother Tat, watching from above, prayed that Pudding would keep up. He usually did. To himself, he was Fearless Pudding the First.

  One morning the barn door squawked open while the kittens were exploring. Farmer Willoughby tromped in clanking his metal pails. Four of the five hunters immediately scampered back to the loft, leaving Pudding behind.

  Someone else entered the barn as well. It was the smaller Willoughby, his son, Johnny. He saw the kitten marooned on a post. Hard to miss a white cat.

  Johnny got his father to squirt some milk into his cupped hands. Then he took it to Pudding while Mother Tat watched from above, desperately calling out.

  “Run, Pudding!”

  Instead, Pudding began to lap the milk from the boy’s hands.

  Little Johnny Willoughby shivered in amazement. The barn cats were wild. Normally they would hiss and bare the fierce needles of their teeth if Johnny even came close.

  But this white one was different.

  Gently, so as not to startle the kitten, Johnny touched the top of the white head. The kitten pressed against it as though he wanted Johnny to pat him. Johnny stroked the silky length of his coat. Stroked and shivered again.

  The kitten’s mother was crying frantically from the loft, so Johnny stepped away and watched the kitten leap from the post to the shelf, then from the shelf to the hayloft.

  With closed eyes. How did he do it?

  * * *

  At the end of a long night of exploration and play, Mother Tat would call her kittens to her. Then they curled together in a patchwork heap — tabby, black, gray and white — to hear her stories.

  She told them about their formidable Grandfather Tat the Thirty-Seventh, who had walked out of the barn one morning. He had traveled to the four corners of the wide world. This was hard for Pudding to picture since he had yet to leave the barn himself and could only see a few feet in front of his face.

  In fact the cats’ wide world was only the Willoughby farm — the farmhouse and its outbuildings, the surrounding fields and woods, the stream that flowed on to the Niagara River, and the neighboring Welland County farms. There really were four corners where the rough country roads intersected and marked the boundaries of the farm. Mother Tat told them that was where the carts passed, with their cat-crushing wheels.

  Beyond the farm was a stream that any water-hating cat would refuse to cross, including Grandfather Tat. That was where he had stopped.

  “Is that where they drown the kittens?” one of Pudding’s siblings asked.

  Mother Tat said that, sadly, any water would do for that awful purpose.

  “How long was Grandfather gone?” the less-fearful Pudding asked.

  “Years and years,” Mother Tat said.

  Mother Tat paused to look at her heap of children, so innocent and dear. They weren’t kittens anymore. Would she ever see them again, her precious ones, once they left? So few cats returned. They would find homes of their own in other barns or in the woods. This was the best she could hope for. The worst was some fatal mishap with a scythe or plow, a fox or yard dog.

  In all cases, their leaving was a mother’s sorrow.

  * * *

  One day while the Tat cats were napping in a pile, a mouse chanced into the hayloft. The kittens woke the instant they smelled it. Mother Tat, too. She wanted to watch her children in action, to be absolutely sure they were ready to go.

  The mouse, likewise smelling the cats, realized its mistake just as the five kittens sprang out of the hay. It ran straight over the edge of the loft, twisting in mid-air as it fell. It bounced off the soft back of the chestnut horse in the stall below and onto the straw-strewn floor. From there it darted to safety.

  The kittens followed in a stampede. Three stopped at the loft’s edge to watch the falling mouse. Pudding, who misjudged the nearness of the edge, didn’t, and neither did his black brother, who was running too fast to stop.

  The falling kittens were not as lucky as the falling mouse. They missed the horse’s back completely. Pudding landed first on his four white feet, as cats do. His brother came crashing down on top of him. Because Pudding had broken his fall, his brother leapt away unhurt.

  But the horse, already spooked by the mouse, kicked out with his hind legs and sent Pudding flying through the air a second time. They all heard the terrible sound of Pudding’s soft body striking the barn wall.

  Mother Tat let out a yowl. In three bounds — from the edge of the loft to the shelf in the milking parlor, all the way to the barn floor — she flew. Fearlessly she darted under the slashing hooves and snatched Pudding by the scruff.

  When she returned to the loft with his pale limp body, the other kittens circled her, bawling. Mother Tat laid Pudding in the hay.

  She said, “Children. Look at your brother. He got behind a horse.”

  As the kittens cried, Mother Tat washed her strange white child and hoped he would survive.

  * * *

  For some time before this accident, a change had been taking place in the barn. A change so gradual that no one noticed it but Pudding.

  Someone was singing.

  Oh, the flea jumped on the dog

  And drank his blood, hey ho!

  Before long, several other voices joined in.

  From cat to dog, from dog to horse, from horse to cow,

  He drank their blood, hey ho!

  Then hundreds of voices sang.

  These were the fleas, which, like the kittens, were born (hatched out of eggs, actually) at regular intervals in the barn. Just as the lives of the cats and mice were connected, so too were the lives of the cats and fleas. They even shared part of their name. Felis domesticus and Ctenocephalides felis.

  As each flea was born, it joined the party on the backs of the barn cats, where it drank enough blood to get drunk. Drunk, it sang and danced.

  All the cats began to itch and scratch. But only Pudding, whose hearing was exceptionally keen, could hear their bellowing laughter and rowdy conversations, the same jokes over and over.

  How do fleas travel? They itch-hike!

  After the chestnut horse spooked and sent Pudding flying into the barn wall, he woke to the same flea hullabaloo as before. His frantic mother was washing him. His brothers’ and sisters’ frightened meowing added to the din of the singing. He put both paws over his offended ears.

  For several hours he lay like this, curled up in the hay and blocking his ears as he recovered from the blow. Because he was not up and about with his brothers and sisters, there
was nothing to distract him from those tuneless songs. They grew unbearable. “The Bloodless Flea’s Lament” went on for hours.

  Woe to the flea who has no blood,

  Not a drop of blood to drink!

  Pudding longed for the buzz-huff-hum-twitter-thrum-scratch-squeak again. The purr-mew-nicker-clank. The rustle-sigh of the wind.

  Then Pudding heard a brash and bossy voice. “You planning on lying here forever?”

  Pudding sat up. He stuck his back foot into his ear and scratched.

  “Hey! Cut it out!”

  “Who’s there?” Pudding asked.

  “It’s me, your mother,” answered Mother Tat, who had not heard the flea. She hovered worriedly over Pudding. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  His brothers and sisters came running, too, but Mother Tat shooed them off. Curling up beside Pudding, she resumed her devoted washing.

  “I got a good one for you,” Pudding heard from somewhere on his back. “What do you call a cheerful flea?”

  From directly inside Pudding’s ear came a grousing reply. “Bor-ing! I heard that joke about a zillion times!”

  “A hoptimist!”

  “Shut up, already!”

  Those were Pudding’s sentiments exactly.

  “You’re not going to croak are you?” the voice asked.

  Pudding scratched again.

  “Hey!”

  “Who are you?” Pudding asked.

  “Someone who’s sick of living with this gang. I saw you covering your ears. I’m guessing you’re sick of them, too.”

  “I am!” Pudding said.

  “Well? Why don’t you ditch ’em?”

  “How?” Pudding asked.

  Mother Tat paused in her washing. Pudding’s mutterings made her whiskers tremble and her mother’s heart beat with alarm.

  “Who are you talking to, Pudding?”

  “I don’t know, Mother,” Pudding said.