Rough Cats at a Glance
When we first arrived in Scotland, the Large House in the Big Woods was the headquarters of a failed Pig Empire; we parted it from the Pig Proprietors for a very reasonable sum on the grounds that, while superficially impressive, it was on the point of falling down. The proximity of a substantial number of merry porkers brought with it a number of corollaries: where there are pigs there are rats, where there are rats, there are feral, or Rough Cats. To be fair to them, this noble band had long done, and continue to do, an excellent job, nary a rat has ever visited the house; the screeches and yells of despairingly defiant rodents have enlivened many a quiet summer evening. But when not actually engaged in rodent patrol, the Roughs are the armies of unreason, sturdy beggars, dole bludgers, or the undeserving poor, ever ready with a hiss or a swift, opportunistic bite to the hand that feeds them.
We arrived to find outselves under the intense scrutiny of two quite similar tabby and white individuals, so early-nineteenth-century in their prim manner of wrapping their tails round their toes, that they were called Wilhelmina and Adelaide. This was a mistake in a number of different ways: Wilhelmina in the fullness of time turned out to be William – by far the nicest of the Roughs, he has in fact now embraced a destiny as a Smooth Cat two or three miles away. His sister Adelaide, on the other hand, has already been mentioned, a cat of the utmost vulgarity. After that we gave up on names as such. There were two stout matrons, distressingly prolific with kittens; they became Mrs Black and Mrs Tiger, not so much names, as labels; and in suit, Big Tiger, Little Tiger, and so forth.
Due to resultant confusion, I decreed after a while that the pullulating kitlings could have two names between them; the black ones are all called Colman, and the tabbies are all Fillan: both these are names of Irish saints, and in both cases, the number of alleged St Colmans and St Fillans pretty near runs into three figures. Thus if pushed to it one low little cat could be St Fillan OF PITTENWEEM and another St Fillan OF LISMORE, but since they neither know nor care, it represents overall a simplification. ‘Who was there when you fed the Roughs?’ ‘Mrs Black, two Colmans and a Fillan.’ In the course of last summer, the Roughs were painstakingly trapped, taken foaming and raging to the vet’s, spayed, de-wormed and de-flea’d, an episode which demands a blog entry of its own. We now, therefore, have a stable colony, having begun seriously to worry that our efforts towards their welfare would simply result, on Malthusian principles, in the acquisition of several hundred hungry cats instead of the eight to ten we were then supporting. We now seem to have about four or five, less when they go hop-picking, which they do once in a while. every concession is automatically taken as a right, the latest potential jacquerie three rough cats patrolling menacingly to and fro in the yard flicking their tails, is apparently anent the withdrawal of their theatre, which they are giving us to understand constitutes an essential aspect of their bleeding rights.