Kidnapped Kitten

Over the years there is no telling how many kittens we have raised.  At one time, I know we had five litters and a total of twenty-something kittens. I kept a permanent ad in the vets office advertising "Barn bred barn cats".  We kept most of the local dairy farms supplied with cats for some time.  That was back in the time before I decided that no matter what it cost, spaying and nutering the barn cats was cheaper than feeding the multitudes of offspring. 

All these cats started with a gentle, sweet tortoise shell cat we brought to the farm from town.  She settled into farm life with a sincere dedication to populating the farm with kittens.  Her first litter of five were greeted with delight and named after candies.  We had Butterscotch, Caramel, Fudgie, Snickers, and Jellybean.  Jellybean grew up to take her mother's place as our resident mama cat.  Jellybean just loved being a mother.  She would purr and lick on her babies until I worried about them being bald.  She would show endless patience in teaching them to hunt and total tolerance of their antics and playing.  She just was the perfect mother. 

However, she had one small quirk.  She liked to hide her kittens when they were first born.  I knew from experience that cats that brought in six week old kittens brought in trouble.  Usually they were already so wild we couldn't catch them to tame them down, which meant they were really hard to place in new homes.  It also meant we also couldn't catch them to treat them if they got sick or injured.  Not a good situation.  So the kids were assigned to watch Jellybean to see when she went to "nest" to have her kittens.  When she disappeared for a day or two and then came back with obvious signs of nursing kittens we knew the hunt was on.  The kids would follow her all over the farm trying to see where she had hidden the babies.  She, in turn, would lead them around in circles until they tired of the hunt, then slip off to her kittens. 

The time in question, she had managed to fool us completely.  I had even gotten in on the game and spent lots of my garden time watching her to see where she was going.  At one point I even climbed into the loft to see if I could find them.  There Jellybean sat, grooming herself with not a care in the world, but I could not find those babies.  She watched me with interest but never giving away a thing.  We were about to give up hope of finding them when she was tricked by her own mothering instincts.

At the same time we had another cat who had a litter of kittens in the building behind the house.  One of her kittens had some sort of colic, rather like cranky babies, and he cried all of the time.  You could hear his little wails all over the yard all day long.  We had taken him to the vet and the result was that hopefully he would outgrow it.  So we put up with the pitiful crying.  Jellybean, on the other hand, became increasingly distraught by the cries.  She would make little mewing noises of distress whenever she came to the house.  It was obvious that the unhappy kitten was really getting to her.

Then one day she could stand it no more.  We were in the yard when we noticed she was circling closer and closer to the kitten who was crying and playing around in front of the building.  Soon she zipped in and grabbed the little one by the scruff of the neck and took off.  With amazement we followed her as she made a bee-line for the hay barn.  Up in the loft she went, exactly where I had searched and searched, and disappeared.  We clambered up and looked around.  No cat.  No kitten.  Then we heard a cry, faint but never ceasing.  We grins of triumph we followed the sound to a sliver of an opening between two bales of hay.  There we found Jellybean and the kidnapped kitten nestled in with her four new babies.  She had obviously decided that if that mama cat wasn't going to take care of that baby, she would!