Gatos Diablos en Bebe May 2017

First, if you are new to my world, I regularly slaughter non English languages. It's funny. So I think I'm saying "Devil Cats and the Baby". My previous Gatos Diablos  posts were inadvertently deleted last year during a panic attack.

    Spring at the Martin house has arrived. After  the hail storm that ruined the new roof we just had fixed in August, and the snow killed our neighbors' flowers, the cats have put me on notice: Feed us on time, or this can happen to you.

   Last week, between storms, Strumph paraded in with a dead baby bunny clenched in her teeth. As per their trademark, they kill the rodents and then show them to me to demonstrate the great power of their gang. "Gimme a treat or dis could be you, get me?" Sometimes they will disembowel them and eat the internal organs, leaving blood smeared across the patio. My summer mornings begin by hosing off the gore,  not unlike a Jersey shopkeeper.

  We had four cats. Then Genoa came back from school and we had five. Then Harper moved out and took a cat with her and we had four. Four seems to be the lowest number we can attain. The newest gang member is "Poe", she is black and was the runt, like Strumph, so is very small. The kind of small you look at and see the word "smol" for some idiotic facebook reason.
 
   Jim  texted one morning last week to tell us---we have an ongoing group text between the four of us, that's normal, right?---that Poe was pissed because he wouldn't let her in the house with a dead mouse. So she sat outside the doors and pouted. What is the point of being a Gatos Diablo if the humans won't even let you in?

   She is  just learning, Jim calls her Aiden's "Mini Me", as Aiden has been a killer her entire life. Ask the ghost of any lizard Genoa tried to own, as well as most birds in the neighborhood. We have no nests anywhere near our house and we are a no fly zone. The problem is the birds are too dumb to figure out that the cats are mobile and travel outside our yard. It is just their home base, their Jersey butcher shop where they sit out front in lawn chairs and chat each other up over espressos, but nobody ever bothers the guy who owns the butcher shop. Birds don't watch many mob movies. They probably should, it would increase their life span.

   Poe --who I am currently watching through the window as she carefully stalks her way through the tall grass---we should mow the lawn, oh right, there's snow--- what is she stalking? She's crouched low, watching intently, damn am I about to witness a mouse murder? She leaps up...to catch a bee. It's a bee, she's stalking a fat bee. Her jaws snap shut and she falls back to the lawn, sans bee. It does not appear that the bee stung her because she didn't recoil. But she is doing that cat thing where she acts like she really didn't want the bee in the first place, so she's slowly walking away.

   She has returned to  my line of sight and is again hopping and leaping at the bees. Should I intervene? Bees are endangered. She can kill all the mice she wants. I do wish she'd stop with the baby bunnies, but frankly we are over run with them. I thought I heard fox pups about a month ago, but I haven't heard them since. If there are no fox, again, this year, then the bunnies are gonna start getting uppity. Which is when Gatos Diablos step in and keep those pesky hoppers in their place.

   I started this because when I opened the door this morning  for the changing of the guard--two cats in, two cats out, dog out (he doesn't quite know where he fits in yet)---I noted a disemboweled baby bunny on the patio. It's still too chilly for me to get the hose and spray it off, but if I leave it all the cats and probably the dumb dog will treat it as a buffet all day long.  So I'll wait until it warms up a bit. The night watch has crashed on the dining room chairs, their furry faces showing no sign of the murderers they are.

    Strumph just opened one eye to look at me.

    I see you. Your food bowl is full whenever you choose to go down and eat.We understand each other, you go ahead and sleep.