So Wolfi, whom I’d been feeding for about a year, just moved inside. She came in the first night I was home from the hospital, having arrived here at 7:30 p.m. and gone straight up to bed. In the night the wind was howling and screaming around the house, and Wolfi had already been run out of the little shelter we’d improvised out of coats, tarp and puppy cage on the first night of my absence. November and a screaming hag’s wind out of the west for the last 3 days. So I got up in the night and opened the door, to see if she needed anything, I guess, and she was there, crying and huddled against the wind. I looked straight at her and said, "Do you want to come in?" I held open the door and let the wind tear into the living room, roaring. My own insiders, Lizze, Schuyler and Stanzi Marie Pcat, were all for giving that wind a wide berth, and that was when she made a dash for it and a sharp left turn under the couch, and from there, straight up into the hallway and up the stairs and zoom under my bed.

      OK, here I am, first night back from hospital, sick as twelve sick dogs, limping around getting bowl of food and bowl of water and then upstairs into the frigid attic to get the spare catbox and some litter and upstairs. Now I’ve got a wild cat under my bed, one who smells a bit, kind of fishy and rank, as she lurks under my little twin bed, huddled on the futon stored there. She’s in—and she stays in, too. Only other cat nuts will understand why I did this, but I had been asking her in, every now and then, just trying it. I hadn’t thought too hard about the idea that she would take me up on the invitation, but when she raced in the door, I knew I’d just have to go with the flow and see it through. (Three months in now, and we’re still a long way from the end of this cat tale.)

      Now, of course, it has been a rotten cold winter (read "winter") this year, not one of those Casper Milquetoast (does anyone else remember him?) pseudo southern winters we’ve been having in PA for the last fifteen years. The icebox outside the walls has led to a dearth of feline requests for "out." They have all decided to set aside that right for the time being — it’s just too damn cold — although Lizzie does request that we put her collar on every morning, even if she has not one momentary thought of going outside. We think she simply enjoys the attention of the collar, but actually, this morning, she did go out, briefly. Her voyage onto the patio took the form of a rapid U turn back into the house.

      Therefore, Wolfi or Fatty Lumpkin, whatever we end up calling her, has not been out-of-doors much either. Her box has moved across the hall and I scoop assiduously, as there is not supposed to be a box in that room—not ever! It is better that she doesn’t go out, because I’ve learned she likes to roll in dirt, to dust herself up, like a horse, and now she naps on, or in, her newly adopted Mommy’s bed. Many things, a cat mom would like to believe are temporary, but that is always a dangerous assumption when you are talking about cats. Kitties love routines, like children, and are miserable when you change them — or try to live without them.

      Now the insiders have seen her around the yard for a year. They hiss and square off, as cats do when they meet in a yard. They stalk each other. Wolfi Lumpkin has been inside for 3 months now, and guess what? Everyone is still stalking, hissing and occasionally boxing. I wonder if it will ever end? I mean, I’ve brought grown cats into a house before, and things eventually settle out. Everyone adjusts to the new indoor hierarchy. Well, buddy, not this time!

      Wolfi the Lump lies at the top of the stairs now, guarding her new territory — the entire upstairs -- with her ears flattened so they can’t see her until the last instant. Ambush! Yikes! Hissing, thunder footing, and that awful scream they do—which rattles the nerves of even hardened cat people because it usually comes as a surprise. For a moment, you think you have a pair of bobcats squaring off in your stairwell. And sin laid upon sin, Lizzie and Schuyler too used to sleep with cat mommy every night. Now the intruder has hogged the best spot. Not that she actually sleeps with me much — she likes better to sit where she can keep an eye on any coming and going by the stairs.

      Well, move the intruder to somewhere else in the house, say those who know more than I do. I say, OK, you go right ahead and try to move her. Wolfi has her original name for a reason. She has teeth, claws, and an understandably paranoid shoot first and let God sort it out kind of disposition. On top of that, after three months of bottomless kitty chow, she is shaped like a ball on short legs, and she was never the svelte type to begin with. She was a short square blocky cat on her best slimmest teen age day, and now she walks like a lady powerlifter, with her long white gloved kitty elbows turned out, and her broad gray flat back. This is how the Fatty Lumpkin thing came about, but everyone who has cats knows that some of them change names during Life Transit, like Native Americans.

      I have yet to be able to pick her up and hold her. I’ve done it, but she struggles, and I know exactly what she’d think if I tried to restrain her against her will. She’s had a bellyful of people doing things to her, which was why she was on the lam in the first place. BTW somebody owned this cat once upon a time. She’s spayed, thank goodness, so she's been to a vet at least once. What happened to her, why she ended up starving and asking me for help, I’ll probably never know, but I think someone did love her once.

      So this saga of Wolfi/Lumpkin has barely begun at our house. I wonder if the other cats will ever be able to come upstairs again. I wonder if I will ever have my lovely orange Lizzie to cuddle at night again. I wonder if they will ever stop hissing at each other, and if I will ever be able to get the cat box out of the upstairs, or feed Lumpkin from the same dish as the others, and not next to my bed. The longer this goes on, of course, the harder it will be to change. That’s the way it is with cats, but this is the winter of our discontent, as it tends to be in February, and so we’ll just have to keep the squirt gun loaded, and pet everyone a lot, and hope for the best.

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