For my newer freaders, the story of how Scooter came to be here is significant to your understanding of this story. He is our youngest cat, our fourth, and has never known another home than our two acres of this little mountain cove.

My three sons. Three was enough. Then WH met BabyCat. BabyCat was born under a double wide trailer. His momma abandoned him when she moved the rest of the litter. A coworker of WH’s found him and took care of him over the weekend, but can’t keep him. None of the shelters or rescues around here would take him either, because he is only 14 days old and has to be bottle fed at least every six hours. So, he’s mine now, and we’re taking him to the beach. Cute little bugger.

Yesterday morning, I let Adicus out, and Scooter was playing with something behind the chair on the screened in porch. Bleary-eyed and irritated, I simply shut the front door behind me, closing off the porch. At whatever point that I let Adicus back in and fed everyone breakfast and made coffee, I didn’t see Scooter hunting or any victims in the vicinity. I made a note to have WH check for a corpse when he got home in the afternoon and went on about my day.

Later, as I was brushing my roasting chicken with herb butter, I was startled by Scooter running into the kitchen full tilt, and a frantic chipmunk running across the top of my foot and immediately turning around and heading to the living room. It sought refuge under our subwoofer. I went back to my chicken, and checked the clock- WH was due home in 15 minutes. At some point, the chipmunk ran back out on to the porch, Scooter in tow. Not like I’m going to attempt a live rescue within an hour of WH coming home.

When WH got home, he called out to me about my plant stand. I came through the living room and saw this:

After the white hot rage subsided, I could see that Scooter had flushed Alvin back under the subwoofer.

WH got his leather gloves and pulled Alvin out from under the subwoofer. He escaped twice, once under the couch and once on to the couch where I was sitting, like right next to me. I snapped this picture right before WH took Alvin out into the front yard and set him free.

After dinner, we saw Scooter hunting something, and this escapade involved Adicus, and then we heard squeaking on the porch. It was a chipmunk. I cannot say definitively that it was Alvin, but come on, really? Two chipmunks within a few hours of each other, when Alvin was surely shocked and worn stupid, like the busty girl running through the woods in high heels in a horror movie? WH broke out the gloves and rescued Alvin yet again. This time setting Alvin free, less the skin on his cute chipmunk tail,  up in the garden.

Not an hour or so after that, I wandered into the kitchen to check on my boiling chicken carcass. I had set the giblets in a bowl when I roasted the chicken earlier that afternoon. They were now sitting in a pool of blood. The idea was to cook them for the dog, but there was Scooter, happily munching on chicken heart out of a Kelloggs Froot Loops bowl on my kitchen counter.

I know he’s somewhat feral, and I know that cats in the wild are carnivores, but I can’t tell you that I don’t find this last part a little disconcerting. He drank every bit of blood from that bowl. Licked it clean.