“My men will know now where to wait for the other two,” was Gum’s final summary.
Something like a nutritional disaster did occur a day after the episode with the leopards.
“It’s like trying to fit a thirty-six tyre on a fourteen rim!” Merby stood looking at the spectacle, giving voice to his way of defining a leopard cub’s mouth and a cat mother’s teat.
The cat mother was Stella.
“She’s the biggest cat in the world,” reminded Mother. “I’ll give the kittens away! I’ve already got a home for one of them.”
Kittens were plentiful.
“The biggest ever house cat weighed twenty-eight pounds, and Stella weighs only eighteen. Check the Internet!” I argued, trying to impress Tensy, who came to collect their kitten sooner than planned, considering the crisis caused by the arrival of the leopard cub.
“You said we could have the little grey one,” she reminded Mother. “How much do you want for her?”
“Let’s wait another fortnight,” Mother said, surprising us all. The new big baby was draining every drop of Stella’s milk and the kittens were getting too little.
“This darling thing,” Merby said, pointing to the cub lying on a rug, sucking desperately on her only supply of food, “will have her new mother for breakfast within a month! We’ll have to get something bigger.”
“I know!” When Mother handled something it always worked, except for singing Verdi at two in the morning simply because she couldn’t sleep. She had been Gum’s tutor when he stayed with us and no cat ever came near them.
“This monster will be Stella’s end!” Merby said again, watching the cub.
“Her name is Shuna!” I said rather protectively. And that was it.
That is where Mother took over. “One day is all I need.” First, she telephoned the chief veterinarian at the nearest game reserve to get his opinion, which was: “It is very difficult.”
She also tried the National Nutrition Institute. Then she telephoned all the neighbours who might have lactating bitches, preferably big ones, but there were none at that point. While falling around, she came upon an unexpected foster-mother idea and it was not a cat she had in mind.
To explain, let me start at our regional fair a few months before and the most exciting race I ever saw.
Milky
Whenever Merby and I complained about her singing, Mother usually went out to the piggery, where there was “… a better appreciation for good music than in this house”, intentionally insulting us.
To get back at her, I had been hoping that some of the youngsters in there would start screaming along with her singing, but pigs are not dogs. They just slept and slept and slept and said “Oink” for food when she stopped.
Now, who ever thought that the Australians invented pig races? The real name is Praces, and so this is where Milky came in.
By way of introduction, a description appeared in a newspaper. (I’m sure they copied it from Mother’s diary, or maybe she submitted something):
A roar goes up from the crowd as the little pigs take the last bend before the end of the race.
The punters are mostly farmers from the district and some townspeople from Loponga. Tribal warriors come here specially to get hold of a piggy as cheaply as possible. Apart from the race, every loser is a future dish of pork. Those coming in last fetch the poorest prices at a rather unprofessional auction, where every contestant wears a band halfway around the neck saying in which position it ended. Ten races occur before 12h00, and then all the winners go into the final. Of course, there are many more losers than winners and this means that everybody can have some delicious dining to look forward to.
In this day’s final, three contestants were way ahead of the others.
“Come on, Jerry!” Dean was sitting close to us. He and I had a huge fight once, but by then we were good friends again.
“You watch it!” shouted Justin, Tensy’s younger brother, from a distance. “My Gascar’s taking the lead!”
“Milky, Milky!” Mother Andrietti shouted, louder than any of the others. I hid my head in shame at her volume, but she couldn’t care less. After all, she sang opposite Di Stefano and Björling and everybody knew that. I joined in with my own effort. My voice was breaking and it sounded like the croaking of a small frog next to a mighty train siren.
First, some quick gossip: On the stage my ‘mother’ was too tall. Italian shorties had to look up to her when singing “Ich liebe dich” or “T’amore”. The result was that some crowds just could not be persuaded to believe in love. When she kissed the operatic suitors, people in the crowd booed the tenors and called out things like: “Find a ladder!” I think she was then sidelined a bit. She married Merby without fuss when he proposed after throwing roses on the stage in La Scala. Still, her voice and status would never change.
Now here she was, coaching Milky, my little white suckling pig, a sow, who could hardly miss this kind of encouragement as she progressed in her lane, crowd or no crowd. She knew that voice from the singing sessions. Yes, Mother’s voice did the trick. It was Milky who passed the ribbon first. It was she who received the pink laurel of victory and got a kiss from Mother, right on her snout, as she lay in a big towel on her lap.
A few months later, Milky was mated with a suitable spouse. She weighed fifty kilograms already, which, by averages, promised a better milk supply for Shuna than Stella could. It was she who lay comfortably with her eight piglets, and now also a strange-looking spotted orphan.
Yes, that was where Mother put Shuna three times a day. First, the piglets were all taken out and placed into a separate basket cage overnight. Then one or two were brought back to Milky. As soon as they started drinking, Shuna was held against a teat on the far side, all under supervision, lest Milky might roll on her in the way mother pigs sometimes do.
Even though this provided a temporary solution, Mother felt the cub was still not getting enough. She took a plane to an airport in the Lowveld, hired a car and promptly went to see Lindy, a doctor who was dedicated to saving injured wild animals as they ended up in her wildlife clinic, a bush hospital. She told Mother she had raised three leopard cubs herself. At last, things started moving in the right direction for Shuna.
“My son carries her inside his shirt,” Mother told Lindy.
“That’s good,” Lindy assured her. “Now, I have this supplement,” and she showed her some industrially packed supplies. “I receive international support from wildlife organisations. You could mix it with cows’ or goats’ milk.”
“She’s drinking from a sow at the moment and it has worked so far. We won’t milk the pig, of course.”
She laughed. “Let her enjoy that as long as it lasts, but add the supplement to other milk. Then, you have to wipe her tail rather frequently till she practises the normal cat hygiene. At two months you could start with little pieces of meat, or perhaps even sooner if you find she is growing too slowly.” Mince, she assured Mother, was likely to work even better.
“Seevie is determined she’ll sleep with him in his bed when she’s bigger. Merby has told him to insure his nipples,” said Mother, laughing heartily, and then they had tea together.
This insult only reached me later. Things like these, said in my absence where I could not defend myself, were rather disturbing. I already had stonies, and Mother knew it.
“Does your son have a girlfriend?” Lindy asked. “Someone phoned about a leopard cub her boyfriend had saved.”
“Yes, and it was she who told me about you. They are obsessed with