twenty two minus nine

As a child, I grew up living on a farm near Carlton, Oregon. Growing up on a farm I had to deal with a lot of chores, situations and events. We raised all sorts of farm animals on the farm such as horses, sheep, steers, pigs and chickens. There were also the family pets, three dogs and twenty-two cats. This story is about the twenty-two cats and the one of dog's named Fritzy. 

We had a variety of different breeds of cats on the farm. There was a black, grey, yellow and a lots of tabby cats. They all had different traits and personalities. They were always hungry and wanting to come in the house. This is why we had a screen door in front of the main door to prevent the cats from rushing into the house when we opened the door. When we would open the door, half of the cats would jump up on the screen door and hang there attempting to get in. Two or three of them would just lay low and wait for the screen door to open and then run down the stairs and hide in the basement until they got hungry and wanted food or water.  I asked myself where did all these cats come from? Do people drive by our house and drop off their cat and say here’s your new home? That's my best guess where all these cats came from.

Then in one spring, one of the tabby cats had a litter of nine kitties. This is when we had a population of twenty-two cats. As a few months go by and the kittens got older. We had an event on the farm as I was coming home from school on our school bus. The bus would use our looped driveway as a turning point to go back the other direction. When the bus stopped in our driveway to let me off, everybody on the bus and including myself looked right into our front yard with disillusion on what happened. There were nine motionless kitties spread all over the front yard. It looked like the Custer’s last stand. I asked myself who could have done such a horrible thing? Then I saw Fritzy our dachshund with a guilt look on his face. He didn't look so innocent anymore. What he did was grab the small kitties one by one with his teeth by the back of their neck, then swings them in the air breaking their neck. I then had to then go and clean up and remove all the dead kitties from our front yard. Now Fritzy didn’t look so cute and innocent anymore, he’s now a kitty killer.

Even though the dog killed all those kitties, he did our farm a favor. We just had way too many cats living on our front porch. Whether it was one of our pets or a farm animal being raised for food. Living on a farm has many faces of death to deal with. This is why I call this story twenty-two minus nine.