Katie

When we first came to Canada, we met some other Americans, Chap and Jan. Chap was a draft dodger, and he and his wife Jan lived in a small log cabin near Tatamagouche. They were younger than we were, and their oldest daughter, Sydney, was the same age as our youngest son, TJ. The Haynses also had another daughter, only about one year old, maybe two, when we first met them. Her name was Joanna. They were sweet, pretty little girls, and we were impressed that here were real live hippies, living in the New Land and surviving on very little. (This would change later on when Chap received his inheritance from his mother’s estate. At the time we first knew him, Chap was fighting his “evil Aunt Dorcas” for the inheritance that was rightly his. It was a hard time for them, I think. There were two little girls needing constant attention, and there was the garden and the building of the house, which Chap was doing by himself.

On top of all this confusion, there was a mother cat with kittens. Jan offered us one of the kittens, a small female, so pretty with her tortoise shell colors. Her fur was luxuriant and soft, and she was small and dainty – and very intelligent. We named her Katie. It was a good name for her – maybe Jan had already named her; I can’t remember. But she grew into a beautiful cat, the first cat on our farm.

She became Dave’s cat. It was obvious that she loved Dave best. But Dave was not really her best friend, because he decided that she should not be spayed. He believed that she should be a mother in order to be a good mouser. Looking back, I see that this was not a good decision. It was really cruel in the end. Katy had many kittens, and some of them we found homes for at first, and one we kept.

The one we kept was Paddlefoot. Well, I had named her Daisy, but the boys insisted on calling her Paddlefoot because she had 6 toes on each of her front feet. But she was as beautiful as Katie in her own way. Paddlefoot had long hair, longer than Katie’s. She too was tri-color, only she had grey fur where Katie had dark brown. Paddlefoot and Katie were allowed in the house, but Katie preferred to be out hunting.

Katie was a wonderful hunter. Once Dave saw her coming home with a rabbit as big or bigger than she was. She had to be a good hunter, because at the end of our time on the farm, the only food we gave her was milk. The tablescraps all went to Lady, our Belgian Shepherd.

I feel a lot of guilt and sadness when I think of Katie. She had to survive on what she could catch in the wild. Towards the end of our stay on the farm, she was eating the banty chicks, and we couldn’t blame her. When we finally gave up and left the farm, we killed Katie and Tiger, and we left Paddlefoot with the tenants who came to live there after we left. We probably should have killed Paddlefoot too, since we could not find a proper home for any of them. We never knew what became of her. I only hope that she was able to stay with the new people who moved there, and that they loved her.

When we first got Katie, we had such hopes for our life on the farm. And at first things were good, and we could provide for her properly. It was only at the end, when we had no income, and when we had to sell my Mom’s antiques to get money for the feed for Bossy, that we stopped being responsible owners. Each time we had to go to the Coop to buy grain for Bossy and the Jersey cow we had bought from a neighbor, I had to make a decision which antique to sell. Some were easy to part with; others were not. I hated to part with my mother’s marble top chest, and the beautiful mahogany dining room table that she loved so much. But in the end, it was always no contest. I could not have stood to sell one of our cows. The cows meant that our children would have milk and butter and homemade ice cream!

Finally, the decision that we put off maybe too long, had to be made. Finally, we had to sell all the animals at an auction sale, and leave the farm. And we had to say goodbye to Katie and Tiger, and the way we had to do it was not good. In fact, it was terrible. Looking back, I think we were very wrong not to keep Katie and Tiger and Paddlefoot. We had made a commitment to them, and if we could not have found good homes for them, then we should have taken them with us. Maybe we didn’t try hard enough to find them homes.

I know that I am to blame as much as Dave. I allowed these things to happen by not speaking up and saying how things could have been different. I could have insisted that the cats be spayed, and that Tiger be neutered. Then, they would not have had such hard lives, and then, maybe we could have found them homes. But knowing that we didn’t do the best thing doesn’t change the way things were. We did what we did, and what is, is.

But I know that I would do differently now. I know that I would do a lot of things differently. But this isn’t a story about what might have been. It’s a story of a family that accepted a new life in a new land. And we weren’t always wise, and we weren’t always faithful to our farm friends. But I will never forget beautiful Katie, and sweet Paddlefoot, and loving Tiger. They, along with all the other animals made our life rich and beautiful, and they were part of our family on South Mountain Farm.

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