Helena Muffin

The cat who started it all is Muffin. Yes, one cat is all you need to eventually get that long list of cats earlier. Her mother's a stray whose favourite number is five.. She made sure that she gave birth to five every time. Muffin was a rare kitten #6, and was abandoned very soon after birth by her mother in front of my neighbour's house, who stupidly started squealing and hosing it with water. We picked her up (soon-to-be-named Muffin, not the neighbour).

We argued over her name and never did give her over to SPCA. We hid her in drawers, closets, and piles of clothes whenever my dad walked by and Muffin went unnoticed for a month. Then she crawled out from under the refridgerator when we couldn't find her and neatly tripped Dad over. Busted.

Since she was raised almost since birth by humans she adopted a lot of our traits and knew our voice tones better than any cat after. Of course she also forgot she was a cat, she got herself knocked up and two of her first kittens died because all she could do was stare at them wondering what the hell just happened. The last one, Spunky was on the verge of death and I painstakingly tried to teach her to feed them and lick them clean. Luckily she got used to it and Spunky soon became the center of all her affection.

She was also involved in so many accidents before she moved out. There was the time where we had a wooden board with rat tar smeared over it in the garden hedge and Muffin dove into it because she wanted one rat for herself. She came out with the board glued to the entire upper part of her body, forehead included. Needless to say she smelt of ____ (I forgot the name of it, I'll fill in the blank when I find out) for weeks. Then my mum rolled over Muffin's upper jaw (who knows how that happened) and gave her the famous snarly-grandma look after it was fixed by the vet. The entire neighbourhood knew her name (don't know how that happened either).

One time a stray dog walked by the house and decided to pick on her, she gave him three long scratches on his nose and sent him whimpering back where he came from with his tail underneath his legs. The next day the dog brought his 'posse', four other dogs identical to him for revenge. It was hilarious. I knew Muffin didn't need backup, so I watched from the window upstairs. She sent all five of them running back up the street, even rode two of them on their backs. She was nasty but was always tolerant enough to let children squeal around her. She would bite your ankles to make you stop if you were dancing really badly.

She stayed with us for three years before moving out. She was apparently suffocated out of her own territory. She comes back to visit my window occasionally, but I haven't seen her for six months now.