NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month – Day 3 – My Uncle’s Barn Cat

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22552 – 865

Here’s the haps:

Greetings Dearly Beloved, Beloved, and Liked-a-whole-lot, Fans, Friends, fiends, foes, foundlings, and assorted nice people who stop by.

Welcome to day 3 of my daily posting challenge which is called NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month. So far, so good. It can get a little difficult what with life getting in the way so frequently sometimes. I like doing this, though. I have a couple of ideas planned for this month, but time constraints prevent me at the moment. I did find this little memory tucked away in my draft folder and decided you might like to hear about my uncle’s barn cat.

First, in the event you might not be aware of what a barn cat is, let me tell you. Barn cats are kind of halfway between house cats and feral cats. They live in the straw in the barn or up in the haymow and don’t particularly like being picked up or held but tolerate being petted sometimes. They will purr at you if you give them a few squirts of milk from a cow. Like everything and everyone else on the farm, they have a job to do. Some are very serious to the point of being pretentious (cats are cats) and some like to have fun. My uncle could squirt milk from a cow’s teat right into the cat’s mouth. It was an amazing site to me.

Another thing was to watch the mighty hunter in action. One time she (the barn cat didn’t have a name, just Cat) jumped up on the back of one of the cows in her stanchion while she was being milked. The cows didn’t really mind and their wide backs made a great platform for watching all the goings on on the floor. She sat up there and kneaded her needle sharp claws in the cow’s hide. Their thick skin doesn’t mind it and it seemed to help the cat concentrate on a mouse running on the floor. No-nonsense now you could watch her eyes lead the target as every muscle in her body tensed and…POUNCE!

The cat landed on that mouse and knocked it silly. Then she just stood there as the mouse regained its senses and thought it would run away. Hah! “Where ya going, little mousie? I want you to stay and play.” You see the cartoons of cats stepping on the mouse’s tail to keep them from getting away? Yup. This was really something to see. I watched as the cat would let the mouse think it was getting away and then pounce or grab or step on it. I don’t remember if Cat wore it out to death or just dealt it a final death blow and then proceeded to tear it apart and eat some of it. Whenever I hear someone use phrases like, “He was playing cat and mouse with him,” I think of Cat.