I can’t seem to drop the saga of Beta Cat, perhaps because by now I’ve moved beyond training Beta Cat, and she has begun training me.
As regular readers of this column know, for a couple of years I had two feral cats living in my basement. At first I didn’t want them around because of their toll on songbirds, but during a winter storm I took pity on the pair and began feeding them. One cat was clearly dominant. She also was bolder about entering the house and being handled. I called her Alpha Cat and dubbed her shy companion Beta Cat.
Alas, Beta Cat lost her constant companion when Alpha Cat was gassed by a fumigator. Concerned that Beta Cat might produce endless litters of feral kittens, I caught her and took her to the vet’s to have her spayed. Only, it turned out she was already spayed. Apparently, she had once been tame. So I tried re-taming her but with little success. Finally, I gave her to Light photography correspondent Barbara Thomas, who did manage to mostly tame Beta Cat.
Several times now, Thomas has brought Beta Cat over to my house for visits, which have not been entirely successful. More than a month ago, she raked my right hand with her claws when I tried to pick her up. The wound is still visible.
A believer in the theory that one should immediately get back on a horse after being bucked off, I picked up Beta Cat several more times to pet her. She didn’t claw me again, but the moment I set her down, she leapt off my lap.
Why? Beta Cat by now is content to be kept inside all day. She eats kibble and uses a litterbox. She still claws the furniture on occasion, but she’s learning not to. When Beta Cat and I are in the same room, she’s quick to rub her cheek against my leg, and she loves to be petted as long as I don’t pick her up.
As it happened, Thomas again brought Beta Cat over for a visit last Saturday. Early in the afternoon, I was lying on my couch listening to music when Beta Cat jumped onto the couch, curled up on my lap, and waited for me to pet her. So that’s what I did, and she dozed off happily purring. "I don’t understand," I told Thomas. "Most of the time I can’t get her to lie down on my lap."
"It has to be on her terms," Thomas replied sagely.
Several hours went by, and Keith Matthews, who runs Point Reyes Software, came by to work on my home computer. When he finished, he and I were sitting at the dining room table when Thomas excitedly called us over to the kitchen window. Just outside was a bobcat about 30 inches long, not counting its bobbed tail.
As we watched, the bobcat wandered along the north side of my house, stopping occasionally to take a nip at some flea or tick in its fur. I was thrilled, for I previously had seen only two live bobcats: one in the Olema Valley and one on Toby Giacomini’s property next to mine.
Sliding effortlessly through a barbed-wire fence, this bobcat too made its way onto Giacomini’s land and proceeded to climb the hill behind my house.
Because I could see the bobcat at such close range, I was immediately struck my how similar it was to Beta Cat. Its walk seemed effortless, but in the undignified style of Beta Cat, it sometimes sat down with one hind leg straight in the air in order to chew on something irritating its belly. The bobcat’s markings were even the same as Beta Cat’s. In fact, except for their difference in size, the two cats looked identical. "Do you suppose...?" I started to ask Matthews and Thomas. Then I answered my own question: if a bobcat had a chance to mate with a housecat, it would probably eat it instead.
Wildcats, in fact, seem to be becoming increasingly abundant in West Marin. Two years ago, I saw my second mountain lion in 25 years. It was sitting across the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road from Nicasio Reservoir, not far from the dam. I saw my first mountain lion when it leapt across a dirt road on Pierce Point as I drove home at twilight from a party at the late Clayton Lewis’ cabin.
And this fall while visiting Bob Powsner and Sasha Ione at the top of Ottinger’s Hill in Inverness, I saw my first coyote. The coyote was even more nonchalant than the wildcats, lying down not far from Pierce Point Road to watch the tourists drive by.
Continuing my wildlife census: blacktail deer are everywhere this year, and many are so comfortable around humans I’ve been able to approach within 15 feet of them. Hunters still shoot such deer, but I can’t see any sport in it. (While driving through Hicks Valley last August, Light reporter Patrik Jorgensen was appalled to come upon a man, who was sitting in a lawn chair on the bed of his pickup truck, aiming at a deer grazing only 20 feet away.)
This fall, I’ve also spotted far more gray foxes than I’ve seen in years. The raccoon population is holding steady, but possums are ubiquitous. Almost every evening I find one scrounging for birdseed on my deck.
And then there are the doves, a hawkish bird if there ever was one. Sparrows or towhees, for example, pretty much leave fellow sparrows or towhees alone when either species has found a scattering of birdseed. A mourning dove, however, may find a far larger scattering than it could possibly eat yet it will spend as much time driving off fellow doves as it will partaking of the seed. No wonder it’s difficult to decide who the hawks are and who the doves are in West Marin’s debate over the Afghan war.
In fact, the doves’ animosity toward other birds of their feather reminds me of Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. In the Dec. 3 New Yorker, writer Isabel Hilton quotes a Pashtun expert as observing: "Pashto is the only language I know in which the word for ‘cousin’ is the same as the word for ‘enemy.’"