Then there were five...

During our time as a family of four, we spent a lot of time (an awful lot of time) at baseball & softball tournaments. My husband loved to play and we had nothing better to do. Most of the time, we'd take the dogs along for the ride. They were always well behaved (well, there was that time Holly chewed on the button on someone's baseball cap but he laughed about it...) and made friends with everybody. One night, though, we'd gone straight from work on a Friday and just as the games were finishing for the night, somebody found a tiny white kitten in right field. Well, I could hardly leave him there, all alone, could I? So we scooped him up, stopped at the store and purchased food, litter box, all that stuff and took him home.

Now Holly had already established her cat chasing credentials by this time. In fact, she'd given me a heart attack a week or so after she came to live with us by chasing a cat up the street. The cat chasing part wasn't the problem. Not even the street was the problem. The problem was she was a three month old whippet who utterly and totally underestimated her speed and, more importantly, her co-ordination. She went head over tail off the edge of the gutter and came limping back home - I was worried she had broken something but apart from the first of many, many chunks of missing skin she was fine.

However, Holly also had maternal instincts, and these came out for our new kitten. We would see them together, with the kitten trying to nurse and Holly keeping her legs out of the way so he could. What either of them got out of that we're not sure, just comfort I suppose. Kirby (as we named the kitten, after the Minnesota Twin's Kirby Puckett) did try the same thing with Sam but that was too much even for a good ole boy dog and he would move away. Mind you, he did the same thing when Kirby ate out of his food bowl as well, despite being 20 times his size.

The three of them got on really well. Sometimes you would see Kirby hiding beside the couch, listening as the dog tags jingling got closer - he would either pounce on Holly, or sag in disappointment if it was Sam.

One day, as he was sitting on the woodpile in the back yard, the neighbourhood tomcat came around - all stiff and swaggering. Kirby merely sat, quietly, on the wood pile. The tomcat got more macho. Kirby sat. And then, suddenly, two dogs exploded out of the dog door and chased the tomcat around the backyard several times before he finally found a hole in the fence and escaped. We've never worked out how they knew he was there but have referred to that as Kirby's 'I've got a Donk' moment (you'll need to watch Crocodile Dundee for that reference!).

We had Kirby for several years, but he was very adept at bringing half-dead birds into the house and once Scott was born, we really couldn't have that happening. So Kirby went to live with my in-laws and a few years afterwards did the 'disappearing cat' thing. With dogs, when they disappear, you usually find them one way or another. With cats, not so much. So we like to think he went to live with some little old lady who spoiled him constantly and let him walk on the counters whenever he wanted, and he lived to a ripe old age.

Anyway, this is the three of them together, though you have to look closely to see the cat part of the pile.