Two Extraordinary Cats
The day Sherman walked into our lives began like most days. Kit and I were having breakfast on the back deck at Breakfast Creek after I had finished feeding the house cats, barn cats, ducks and geese. You don’t live in the country without being attentive to the food needs of all creatures great and small before pouring your first cup of morning coffee. It just wouldn’t work. Once fed, they were happy, and we could enjoy listening to a chorus of contented quacks and purrs.
But on the particular morning about which I am writing, I recall hearing a strange meow and saying to Kit, “It’s not coming from our clowder of cats.” After breakfast, I headed for the fenced vegetable garden to do some weeding. The air was cool as I worked my way from the lemon thyme at one end of the herb bed to the oregano at the other, extracting leggy sprigs of grass from the dense weave of herbs, one invader at a time. With feet planted firmly on the straw pathway that defined the row, it was an exercise in bending, stretching and losing myself in thought.
Near the rosemary, I heard the strange meow again, closer this time and louder, coming from the base of a nearby bush. From where I stood, the area under the bush appeared to harbor nothing more than a play of shadow and light until something moved—something big and black and white.
“What an unusual looking breed,” I remember thinking to myself when the creature that cautiously emerged into full sunlight could clearly been seen to be a cat. Must be lost I thought, or more likely someone dropped him off.
I continued to weed for a while longer under the cat’s watchful eye until he stood up, arched his back and stretched as if mirroring my motions inside the garden. When I straightened up to get a better look at him, he sat down and stared directly back at me. A solid mask of black ringed his eyes and square forehead. His hind legs were especially long and his chest stocky and wide. But his most distinguishing feature was the absence of anything more than a knob for a tail.
“I’m calling him Sherman,” I told Kit a week after the cat had become a regular fixture on the back deck, “because he’s built like a tank. The only problem is that he’s a she, and if I’m not mistaken, quite pregnant. We’ll have to keep her, at least until the kittens are born.”
With that settled, Sherman took up residence on an old towel in a chair on the back porch, eating every last kibble that came her way and growing rounder by the day. Knowing she would need a sheltered nest for her kittens, I hauled a fresh bale of straw into the former chicken house behind our barn that has served as a brooder house for all of our ducks and geese. After vacuuming out the cobwebs, I set it up with a heat lamp for cool nights, a small rotating fan for hot afternoons, a litter box, and bowls for kibbles and water.
Finally, I carried Sherman into her cozy quarters and set her down on the bed of golden straw. Two days later, she delivered four beautiful offspring, rolled over, pushed her solid body into the soft straw, and purred adoringly at her precious kindle of kittens. The largest was a gray male with a white underbelly and no tail; the others were all calicos, only one of which had a tail.
“You are Manx cats,” I explained to Sherman and her sleepy caboodle one afternoon, “intelligent, friendly, rumbustious creatures, very solid and British of breed with a rabbity gait because your hind legs are longer than the front. You are also especially easy to train and love playing with children. A Manx with no tail whatsoever is called a ‘Rumpy’ and those with a wee bit of a tail like all of you are ‘Stumpies’.”
“Goodnight, little darlings,” I said, realizing the kittens were all sound asleep.
After I wrote a newspaper column about Sherman, a wonderful family from Macon, MO adopted her and three of her kittens. We kept one—a true rumpy with a black facemask and intelligent, black eyes. We named her Phantom, soon shortened to Fanny because of her round, no-tail rump.
Fanny grew to be a hefty cat like her mother, spending her first year exploring Breakfast Creek, then seven months in the high desert of New Mexico before returning to Missouri and settling into Boomerang Creek with Kit, our other two cats Pooh and Scribbles, and me for the rest of her long life.
There she freely explored the meadow, woods and creek on our five acres, shadowing me outdoors as I gardened and moved about. Summers she napped in the shade garden or on the porch, and winter evenings she stretched full length atop my lap, warmed by our Buck stove.
On our final Mother’s Day in Missouri in 2021, Fanny visited the creek below the house one final time and died peacefully the next morning next to me on our bed. Like her mother Sherman, Fanny was an extraordinarily intelligent cat—beloved and missed to this day.
