It is not a subtle thing to come down the stairs and see your wife and a good friend (Ellen) looking out a window and talking in low tones. I approached the pair and looked outside to see what they were observing. There, in my backyard, next to our unused sunroom, was a pile of kittens huddled together. Meredith explained that she and Ellen had been discussing on whether or not to tell me about the new felines since the odds were high that if I knew they were there then I would make it my mission to capture them for adoption purposes.
I think there were six kittens with a mama kitty nearby. Two immediately stood out to me – the run of the litter who was an all-black kitty with large ears. I pitied him as the runt and wanted to make an effort to get him. The other kitten that stood out was a beautiful explosively-fuzzy long haired kitten with a white chest. He was a little tub of a kitten, and so was clearly the alpha of the litter. I clearly needed to try to get him as well. Of course, any and all of the kittens were fair game to be captured and adopted, but the runt and the tiger were special to me.
My memory fails me after fifteen years. All of this happened back in June of 2011. We had plans with Ellen and so we went and did those plans, but I believe that later I made an attempt to catch the mound of kittens and failed utterly as they scattered as I approached. It did succeed in momma moving them somewhere.
Ellen returned home from her visit and a few days later I was walking to work when I could swear I heard a cat softly meowing, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. I went on to work. The next morning I went around the corner of my neighbor’s house, which gave me a view of the back yard. The house was abandoned since the previous owner had died a few months before and I think a bank took possession. So it wasn’t a yard where I would expect to see any changes, but this morning I saw something new just off the back of the house near an old porch. Curious, I walked slowly over to the object, and it slowly resolved into a pile of kittens huddled together. As I got closer, they scattered, and the black runt ran into an open basement window.
This was a problem. I was worried that the kitten might have fallen on to the basement floor and wouldn’t be able to get out. So, I trespassed. I opened the window as wide as it would go and squeezed in through the tight opening, lowering myself blindly to the floor. I hear a fain mewing from the back of the basement, closest to the road. I walked over to the mewing and I found the cowering form of the fluffy tiger kitty. He must have been the crying I had heard the other day. He had made his way long the concrete sill of the basement about one-third of the way around, and I think he couldn’t figure out how to get back out. I caught him up in my hands, and let myself out the front door and brought him home. Thus, Alpha came to his home of fifteen years.
(As an aside, I went back and rescued the runt kitty, who came home with me while biting my hand the whole way. He is our cat Cesario.)
Alpha was an adorable kitten. He seemed to be made of fifty percent head. It took him a little time to warm to us (a couple of weeks), but he ended up being the sweetest cat we’ve ever had in our home. All the other cats, no matter how much they got on each other’s nerves, always loved Alpha and never fought with him.
In 2020, when I captured a tiger kitten on the open lot next to our house and brought him home, the kitten quickly came to love playing with Alpha. Alpha would patiently put up with the kitten trying to attack him, but usually held him off by extending a much-longer paw out to hold the exuberant kitten at bay.
Alpha grew into a stunning cat, and was a big boy. He loved his food and he grew into his large frame. He had a very fine fur that the vet termed “rabbit fur” and he had tons and tons of it. And then winter would hit and he would grow even more. His white chest hairs would grow double in size making an enormous ruff that stayed with Alphy all winter long.
Alpha wasn’t perfect, of course, but he was always cute. We found he liked to climb our artificial Christmas tree, and so after many bent branches under the ever-increasing weight of a big kitty, we made the switch to a deciduous (leaf instead of needle) tree that was bare-branched. That curbed Alpha’s tree climbing career.
Alpha loved string, to his own threat. I had a gyro ball that was wound up by string. One day, I couldn’t find the string that I had just had, and saw Alpha slurping down the last inch of a foot-long (or longer) string. I was worried it would get tangled in his intestines, but I was (somewhat) relieved to find the string in the litterbox a couple of days later. I threw it out.
When Alpha couldn’t find string, he would try to make his own. He would pick at beds and towels to loosen strings up so he could munch on them. We had to mount new and higher towel hooks in our bathroom so he couldn’t reach the towels. We had to be very vigilant to make sure our shows (with tempting laces) were always in closed closets. Our bed box springs all were picked over and fuzzy with fine strings for Alpha’s amusement.
Alpha’s one physical quirk was his eye. He had beautiful huge green eyes that made him look extra cute (we heard a study that big eyes provoke positive reactions in people). But, oddly, in his left eye the iris didn’t fully work. Half of the iris worked fine, but the other half was always fully open, so that in bright rooms one half of the eye was a slit and the other half was fully open. It must have been blindingly bright to Alpha, but he never let on that it bothered him at all.
As a young cat, Alpha used to have silent meows. He would open his mount and nothing would come out. That changed as he aged. He became quite vocal, especially in his last five years. He would meow loudly from the bathroom sink that was his favorite place and try to snag you as you walked by so you would pet him. He would also start reminding me that it was supper time when he thought it was time (usually 30-45 minutes earlier than the 3:00 feeding time).
Oddly, as Alpha aged, his stripes went away. He was still a striking brown and white cat, but no longer had his tiger stripes. I’ve never seen that happen in a cat before.
As a young cat, Alpha would come to me in the downstairs bedroom when I called to him if I were taking a nap. He would jump on the bed, settle in, and need and purr next to me. It was quite a wonderful way to drift off to sleep. In his later years, he generally stayed on his sink instead, but I loved his company for napping.
Meredith bribed Alpha with cat treats. When Alpha’s fine fur got tangled, we would use an electric razor to shave the tangle off of him. Mer would give him treats afterwards, and he always put up with it to get the food. The other cats started to associate the razor motor noise with treats and so would come running. Mer decided that Alpha should hunt his treats, and so she would scatter them on the floor and he would chase them. If another cat got near a treat, Alpha would shoot out his paw and cover it and drag it toward him.
A little over a year ago, Mer and I noticed that Alpha was getting thin. He had always been a big cat, so this seemed more than the usual aging-cat weight loss. We took him in to see the the vet and he was diagnosed with a thyroid issue that required he be given two pills a day for the rest of his life. He never regained any of his lost weight, but his weight loss stopped for about a year.
Alpha’s bloodwork tested fine at his last checkup a couple of months ago, but he looked to us to be getting skinnier. We were to take a trip to Sweden in early June, so we warned the cat sitter that we thought Alpha could pass away while we were gone because of how frail he had gotten. Happily, Alpha hung in there until we got home on Wednesday, June 17th. He was still frail, but still chased treats and was able to get on the sink. Thursday he seemed normal although he sought us out on the couch, which was rare over the last year. On Friday evening, I told Mer that I thought Alpha’s breathing was labored, but otherwise he seemed normal, so I decided to keep an eye on him. I woke up early on Saturday and tried to feed Alpha, but he wouldn’t eat anything, not even his treats. When Mer woke up a little later, I told her I thought it was time to put Alpha to sleep and to schedule the appointment for me while I was out running to clear my head. She did, and the vet was able to get us an appointment for the late morning on Saturday, and so we said goodbye to Alpha. He was a loving puff ball of a gentle cat, and so while he may not have been the Alpha male of the litter, he was the Alpha cat of my heart. I will miss him.