On the brink

Tonight we are waiting. With heavy hearts.

Tonight, one of the Carmine cats is in hospital fighting for his life. Parasites. Viral infection. Anaemia. Cortisone. Antibiotics. And crossed fingers.

Mr Orange (named only a few weeks ago by AJ) is a survivor. Born in 2005 in a litter of four, he was always as a young kitten the most timid. The first to high-tail it back into the wood-pile his mother was using as a nursery. One morning his mother was crying. There was blood on the wood and three kittens gone. Mr Orange was found not far away, but far enough to have escaped whatever animal decimated his family. His mother wept for her kittens for a fortnight, and every mother in Carmine wept to hear her.

Mr Orange spent the following winter in our house with our big tabby tom (his uncle), curled up on top of Mathilda (see November 2007, Ecco Mathilda!) or hogging the baby-changing station (then in the kitchen). But when he came of age, the tom, king of the Carmine cats, saw him off and he became an outlaw. We saw him not at all the following summer and thought that we had lost him. But this autumn he turned up asleep on the hay in the baita close to Palazzo Pollo (where we keep the chickens).

And what a beautiful cat he had become! Sleek and lithe. And tall and elegant. And with emerald green eyes that on a woman would be her passport to international fame and fortune. But despite his long legs and winning ways, he was still outcast.

And today he was sick.

But if tomorrow he is well, he will be welcome to spend the rest of his life in our house, chasing pesky mice around the woodshed, patiently tolerating the children and sleeping, elegantly, on top of Mathilda.

Fingers crossed.