by Alan Parks
I thought I could make out four grey and white bundles, plus the one in my hand made five. Poor Meeny had had five kittens and she was only tiny herself. I dumped the kitten back in the little hole and hoped that Meeny would find her and give her a feed later.
So we were still in the dark as to exactly how many kittens we had and where exactly they were, but we had seen that all three mums had at least one alive and well and feeding. We thought Mo had two, Meeny had five and Eeny at least one.
One day while feeding the alpacas we found Stumpy Jack and his little grey sibling in the stack of hay in the barn; they were in really deep, about two bales back and huddled in a little nest. Mo was doing a good job.
Meeny’s kittens in the chicken coop had started to get active; they were regularly falling out of their little hole and then mewing loudly for their mum to come and rescue them. She brought one of them to the garden by our kitchen, but we could still hear the others mewing, so we collected them for her and brought them to where they would be safe away from the dogs’ area.
“I can hear the kittens by the pool pump, crying,” Lorna said to me.
By the time I’d reacted she was already wading through the waist high, prickly weeds to find them. There they were, two of them, a grey one and a tabby one, but no sign of Eeny.
“I’m going to bring them around to be with the others,” Lorna said. “At least we can keep an eye on them there.”
So we did that. All the kittens got on immediately and would you believe that Meeny also fed the two new ones? Soon enough, Mo’s kittens had become big enough to jump from the hay, but weren’t able to get back up; so we brought them to join the rest of the group, hoping that Mo might take on a couple more mouths to help Meeny out. After a few days she did allow the others to feed from her, but not without her putting up a fight for a while.
There were now nine kittens; I’d had a quick look and thought there were 5 girls and 4 boys. I didn’t think the boys would be a problem as they would go off and wander when they got bigger, but I was starting to worry about all the female kittens around.
We were invited to lunch at a friend’s house and we were discussing the kittens; I was trying to convince them to take some for their house in the campo. We got on to the subject of animals being abandoned in the campo and we just happened to mention that we had been lucky, for quite a while now no animals had been dumped on us.
When we got home, Miliko and Carlos were going crazy. I went running to see what the problem was, hoping neither of them were hurt or anything. When I got there, I could see a black kitten on the wall, curled up in a ball, obviously in a panic. On closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t one of the nine kittens we already had. Someone must have thrown her over our fence; she’d found her way around to the terrace and had now got herself into a predicament.
I pushed the dogs back and tried to grab the kitten, but she panicked, scratched me down the length of my arm and jumped to the ground. Carlos and Miliko were on her like a shot; I even saw Carlos have her in his teeth for a split second. I dragged Carlos away by the scruff of his neck and Miliko was unable to really cause her a problem because he can’t open his mouth properly.
The ruckus alerted Lorna and she came out to find me with Carlos cowered under me, scared because I’d dragged him away, Miliko in a trance and blood pouring down my arm from the scratch. The kitten had made it over the wall and was now perched on a ledge, about 4 metres high, above the alpaca paddock, but at least she was safe for now.
“There’s a new kitten,” I said to Lorna, “and it’s not one of ours!”
We both went to the paddock to see this little thing perched on the ledge looking petrified. She wouldn’t come down, not even for food, although she had probably never seen cat food before. Eventually I managed to get her to walk down a plank of wood towards me, where I could grab her gently and have a quick look to check that she seemed OK, before putting her with all the rest.
She was slightly bigger than the others. She probably came from a litter on one of the local farms, where they may have destroyed the rest and just kept one to prevent the mother getting mastitis, and now she was weaned they had dumped her at The Olive Mill.
Little did we know that this one was a trouble-maker.
I had tentatively tried to sex the kittens, but it was difficult as there were so many and about half of them looked alike. We have also made mistakes in the past (see R Denise), when balls have appeared on cats we would have sworn to be female. The following day there were only four kittens outside the kitchen where they had taken up residence and they seemed to be all the boys. For the rest of the day we looked around The Olive Mill, but there was no sign of the kittens. We thought they had done one of their disappearing acts but as they were so small and so young it was a bit of a worry.
I could just picture the scene in my head, six little kittens wandering down the road, being led by the new and mysterious black kitten, off to pastures new and wild adventures. For 24 hours we saw no sign of them, until we were feeding the alpacas in the early evening.
“I can hear kittens,” said Lorna.
We both stood and listened. She was right.
“I can hear them too.”
I started to meow, talking to the kittens and trying to locate them.
“Meow! Meow! Meow!”
“What ARE you doing?” Lorna said to me, looking at me like I had lost it. I just carried on.
“Meow! Meow! Meow!”
There was a response this time. Two of the little kittens came out from some weeds on the other side of the track, walking towards the fence.
“Go and get them,” I said to Lorna.
While I carried on talking to them, she got them to follow her back in through the gate. Once they were out of the way, I went out to where they’d been and started the calling again.
“Meeow! Meeeow! Meeeeeeowwww!”
I could hear a faint, distant call. I walked down the hill towards the noise.
“Meeow! Meeeow! Meeeeeeowwww!”
The replies were getting louder now. I was getting closer to the gate to Miguel’s land and at the bottom of the hill was where the stream runs for most of the year. Of course, by this time there was no water there, but the stream was replaced with thousands upon thousands of dried up eucalyptus leaves. I walked along the leaves, listening closely, until after a couple of minutes, I spotted one of the kittens on a tree branch. Then I saw the black one, the trouble-maker and then two more. I tried to grab them, but they were nervous and ran under a small bridge. I crawled on my hands and knees underneath trying to reach them, but they kept evading me. That was the position I was in when Lorna found me.
“I’ve found them, but they keep running away.”
After a few minutes of chasing the kittens around the trees, Lorna had an idea.
“I’ll go and get some food.”
Food is the answer to many problems at The Olive Mill.
As she started back up the hill the kittens followed. First, the bigger, black one, followed by the other three, before a tiny grey one tagged on at the rear. As we walked up the hill, they continued to follow, but every few metres we had to stop and wait for the little grey one to catch up. At the top of the hill they could see the gate of home and made a run for it.
Mo happened to be coming out of the courtyard at the time and she meowed at them and they all ran for her. It was a joyous reunion, at least for the kittens, if not so much for Mo. The kittens were all reunited and given some water to drink.
A few hours later Lorna went out to give all the cats a bit of food and found the little grey kitten slumped on the ground. She wasn’t interested in the food and we couldn’t get her to take a drink.
The first thing that came to me, and I don’t know where it came from, was maybe it was heatstroke.
“We need to cool her down. Cover her in water, and syringe some into her mouth.” I said.
Even as Lorna was giving her a drink she was flo
ppy and it looked as though we were going to lose her there and then. A few minutes later she was holding her head up a little.
Between us we gave her some more water by syringe and bathed her again in cool water, and again; a few minutes later she was able to sit on the floor herself before wandering about. Of course, we had shut Blue and Arthur outside, otherwise they would have had her for dinner.
“Let’s see if she wants some food,” I said.
We put out some cat meat and some biscuits. She didn’t take to the meat, but she was chewing on the biscuits. Slowly she got stronger and stronger and she ate more and more. An hour later and she was wandering over the kitchen investigating. You would not believe it was the same floppy cat that Lorna had held in her hands an hour before. I guess her little adventure with the others was too much for her. We were even happy to put her back out with her brothers and sisters for the night, especially as it was cooler out there than in the kitchen.
We separated her for the next couple of days to make sure that she got a fair portion of food, and she thrived.
She is still small now, but she’s quite strong and healthy.
That new girl is my heroine. She came in, took on the dogs and then came to live with us. She is beautiful.
A few days ago she took us on an adventure and we went out of the farm and down to the river. It was hard for me as the others are bigger, stronger and faster, but I made it all the way down. But then she didn’t know where we were going and we just sort of waited for something to happen. Two of my sisters went home on their own, so there were four of us left. I was hungry and thirsty and starting to worry.
Then the people arrived and tried to catch us. The others tried to run, but I just wanted to go with them. In the end the lady walked up the hill, so we all followed. Later that night I felt very sleepy and the lady brought me into the house and gave me some special food, all for myself. It was lovely. Now I feel much better and I like it here. The new girl seems happy to be here too, so I think we will be here for a while, but then again maybe another adventure would be fun!
Little Grey
Chapter 2 3
Lorna’s Lumps
“I don’t know what to do to help,” I said sadly, looking at Lorna crying her eyes out and standing in the swimming pool in just her underwear, splashing the cool water onto her legs and stomach.
“I can’t take it anymore!” Lorna wailed.
Over the previous few days the lumps had graduated from a small patch on one of Lorna’s legs, to raised, hot, itchy masses all over her thighs and stomach and now they were driving her to distraction.
When the first lumps had appeared we thought she had been bitten by a mosquito, as that was how they looked. They were red, raised and very itchy. We had tried insect bite cream to no avail and so far the only thing that had offered any relief was alcohol-based hand sanitiser that had been kept in the fridge and was ice cold. Although this didn’t solve the problem, it had, until this point, offered relief from the itching.
We had to make a trip in to Montoro to see Manuel the vet about some medication for one of the animals and then we’d visit Jorge in the pharmacy.
In the vet’s surgery, Lorna lifted her top to show Manuel the lumps.
“Do you know what could be causing this?” she asked him.
He looked closely.
“It looks like mosquito bites,” he said.
But by now Lorna was covered and the lumps were appearing fast, yet there were no mosquitos biting. Next, we headed to Jorge’s pharmacy to collect the medicine we needed and in Jorge’s little office, Lorna showed him the lumps.
“Do you know what could be causing this?” she asked again.
“Hmmm!” Jorge was thoughtful. “Hold on. I am going to ask my brother; he has a house in the countryside, he may know more.” Off he scurried.
While we were waiting for Jorge to return, Lorna was again covering herself in hand sanitiser.
“Spiders!” he said as he came around the corner into his office. “My brother says spiders. Little spiders are biting you. You need to fumigate your house.”
Jorge sold us a tin of spray, but it meant we needed to evacuate the apartment for 24 hours. Luckily we have other places in The Olive Mill to sleep.
“Spiders? Bloody spiders!” Lorna said to me as we left.
Both Lorna and I are terrified of spiders; luckily we don’t have many at The Olive Mill.
The biggest spider we ever saw was when Mark, Lorna’s son, came to help us with some building work the year after we moved here. I had gone out one day to Montoro, and as I pulled through the gates, Mark was standing on the terrace calling me.
“Where have you been? We’ve got a massive spider trapped and we need you to get rid of it,” he shouted to me. Mark is six foot, three inches and works in security.
“Why didn’t you just stamp on it?” I asked.
I don’t really believe in killing anything, even insects, but spiders and wasps cause me a problem.
“It’s too big. We’ve got it trapped under a glass. Hurry up!”
When I came through the door of the apartment, both Lorna and Mark were standing in the kitchen staring towards the ground. There it was. It was indeed a huge spider trapped under a plastic glass. There was an orange balanced on top of the glass.
“Why is there an orange on the glass?” I asked.
“We didn’t want it to escape. It might have been able to push the glass over.”
My spider disposal skills are not very good. I am as scared as everyone else is of spiders. I can’t pick them up and often it is all I can do to get close enough to stamp on them. This one was huge and I didn’t want it to run, as then I’d panic. I didn’t know what to do.
By now Mark was laughing, as each time I moved towards the glass the bloody spider reared up in defence. This in turn made me jump, make a strange “Urrrghhh!” sound and Lorna would scream. Then we’d all gather ourselves again, laughing, for the next attempt.
Eventually I managed to slide a piece of paper under the glass and under the spider, but I wasn’t sure what my next move was going to be.
“Throw it on the fire,” Mark suggested.
Hmmm, it did seem like an option. The fire had just been lit for the evening and was a mass of burning paper, firelighters and wood in the centre of the log burner. It was only a small distance to the fire, but to get the spider out of the house would mean an epic journey across the room and at any time I could have dropped him, then we’d all have been standing on chairs screaming. So I opted for the fire. OK, I know it was wrong, and a creature is still a creature. You don’t need to make me feel any worse about what happened next.
I took a deep breath and moved towards the glass. Mark opened the door of the fire. It was a precision exercise. I scooped up the paper and the glass, scurried across the room and launched the whole package into the fire and Mark quickly shut the door. The paper caught light almost immediately, followed by the plastic glass melting and lighting, but we couldn’t see the spider. I hoped I hadn’t dropped him; then we saw him. He was running around the outside of the fire trying to escape. I had a pang of guilt, but it was too late, and the next thing he caught fire, but he was still running around the perimeter. Eventually he was gone, incinerated in a pile of ash.
Anyway, back to Lorna’s lumps…
We had recently moved bedrooms, so we were now sleeping in a cooler bedroom for the summer months; hence this spider theory could be correct. We hadn’t seen any spiders, or indeed any insects, but something had to be causing the lumps. We stripped the bed and washed everything thoroughly and closed all the windows. I had to wear a surgical mask while spraying the insecticide and I covered every wall, floor and ceiling with the stuff; then I got out and left it.
That night we were hopeful that sleeping elsewhere would have put an end to the problem, as well as killing the tiny offenders, but during the night Lorna was again in tears, covered in lumps.
The next day
we went back to Jorge.
“It can’t be spiders,” we said. “It even happened in a different room and a different bed.”
“Hmmm...” Jorge was thoughtful. “I wonder…” He wandered off.
A few minutes later he returned, reading the label on a packet of pills.
“Try this,” he said “It is an antihistamine. We give it for allergic reactions.”
So we bought it. It was about €15, but if it worked it would be worth it.
The next day Lorna’s lumps had vanished. The itching had stopped too. What a relief. A few days later, the lumps returned, but as soon as Lorna took an antihistamine pill they’d go away again. The only problem was that the pills made Lorna drowsy (more so than normal). It got to the point that every time we had a visitor we would ask them to bring some anti-allergy pills from Boots, as these worked just as well, were supposed to be non-drowsy and were a fraction of the price compared to the pharmacy.
After a few months of the lumps coming and going, they just stopped happening. We still don’t know if it was a symptom of Lorna’s sarcoidosis, or if it really was spiders biting her.
Chapter 2 4
Shopping for Chickens
Over the past couple of years our stock of chickens has gradually reduced. Natural deaths have occurred, as have a couple of mysterious disappearances that we were at a loss to explain.
When we started with chickens we had won our first two in a game of farmers’ bingo and called them J-Lo and Beyoncé. We loved them so much we decided to get some more, so Ricardo and Rita had accompanied us to the farm in Cordoba where it was possible to choose chickens from a menu and take them home. This was where we got the ‘Aunties’. We had chosen 6 new chickens and named them Auntie Marge, Auntie Jess (both white), Auntie Mabel (brown), Auntie Eileen (black), Auntie Jean and Nanny Audrey (both speckled).
The first chicken we lost was Auntie Jean. She developed a wheezy chest. We visited Manuel to ask for some advice and he gave us some antibiotics to mix into the chickens’ water. We tried to keep Auntie Jean inside for a few days, but she wasn’t having it. She might have been a little ill, but she wanted to be out and about so we let her be. One day I found her in the paddock where she had keeled over and died.