The Leopards of Sh'ong. Paul Jaco

      At home, all cages were spotlessly clean. Guess why: It was my job to see to the piggery over weekends when the staff were off. It was also my privilege to take Shuna over from Mother as a kind of midwife whenever I was around.

      That woman, Lindy, on the photograph kept haunting me. A doctor! She looked so young and she was pretty … Mother would chide me regularly when I fell in love with older girls. How she always caught on is another matter, and all I did was pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then, suddenly, the girl was a matter of the past and life went on. For a while this Lindy kept coming back in my thoughts and I vowed to myself Mother would not know about it.

      Spotted Boarder

      When all the piglets had been weaned, Shuna still visited the Milky pub, but quite soon a drought set in. She turned rough and hurt Milky as she climbed on top of her. The supplement arrived just in time. We gave it to Shuna with dairy milk. Minced meat completed the diet.

      Soon, Shuna started causing trouble. A special friendship had developed between her and Stella, whom she kept regarding as her mother and with whom she often slept. Stella taught her all about mice and other rodents as soon as the other kittens had left.

      Later, Shuna began looking for something more substantial. Her first victim was a piglet from another farrow, one that strayed into her domestic territory, and thereafter the security of the cages needed stepping up. Whenever a piglet broke out, she was onto it within seconds and there went someone else’s dinner.

      When I was away at boarding school, Mother kept the cub cosy in Stella’s box among some rugs. She was growing as tough as nails, but with Stella, however, she was gentle enough. When she “meowed”, it sounded like a door creaking open, but it called Stella to her very quickly.

      Despite some terrible smells and the destruction from her explorations, like climbing up my curtains when no one was around, I let Shuna sleep with me in my bed. In time, she turned into a house cat, knowing where the window was and how to get back. The holidays started, with her and Cram playing morning, noon and night.

      She disappeared one evening, but I knew she had to be somewhere and I didn’t give it much thought as I had more troubling things on my mind at the time. I reasoned that she would get inside in her own way and the logical thing for me was to fall asleep.