Fading Tiger, Royal Mama

A Tale Befitting Mother’s Day

 

Say what you will about Wal-Mart, but any store where you can go in the middle of the night to get something called “milk replacer for kittens” has reached some pinnacle of convenience. Seriously, I didn’t even know what I was going there to look for exactly, I just went on the off chance that they might have something that you could squirt into a little kitten’s mouth that would replace mother’s milk, and there it was – “milk replacer for kittens.” Kudos to that product labeling.

And so began my tenure as the surrogate boob.

The fading tiger was emaciated, somewhat lethargic, and not taking to the teat, not to mention his gloopy infected right eye was swollen shut. Something had to be done. I was starting to fret about one of the kittens dying on me and how Mamasita might react. She might have been a stray from the school of hard knocks, but she doted on her babies. If one went out of sight, or if another starting mewing pitifully, she leapt into action. A good mother is such an elegantly programmed thing.

A bachelor is not such an elegantly programmed thing, at least not in the arena of nursing. I had bought this tiny little bottle (made for animals) and promptly dropped the rubber nipple under the stove (you know, in that little space between the floor and the bottom drawer of the stove, the space that in my house you don’t really want to look in). Well, shoot. Luckily, the successful bachelor IS programmed to know his limitations, so I had bought two bottles just in case of such fumbling.

Do you know that those bottle nipples don’t even come with a hole in them already? Yeah, I learned that the hard way, too, after a projectile moment. This was remedied with a pocket knife, some matches, and some micro-surgery on the kitchen counter. Voila, hole in the nipple. Momentum was mine.

That is, until I tried to feed the fading tiger. Sitting on a cold garage floor with a bottle as small as my thumb and a kitten as small as the bottle, I bumbled and fumbled and made a royal mess of the bottle, the floor, my jeans, my shirt, and left the pitiful little guy’s face and chin covered in milk replacer. Well, the Wal-Mart product labeling didn’t say anything about this! But you know who did? Yes, Google, the search engine that gave me a few thousand links on how to feed a baby kitten without drowning it. But when all was said and done, the problem was this: the kitten wasn’t eating. He didn’t want a teat, he didn’t want a bottle, and he didn’t want some human shoving his face into either.

I was determined to keep trying after the initial failures. I tried again in a couple hours. Then again. And then, like a dormant engine kicking into gear with a jolt, the fading tiger finally took to the bottle. And boy did he ever! Chomping and reaching and convulsing in awakened hunger, he just about tore the rubber nipple out of the bottle. Knowing something was happening, Mamasita came and hovered over the fading tiger like a custom roof. She purred and the kitten chomped harder at the bottle. And I’ll be darned if his right eye didn’t pop open in the middle of it all.

In an act of infinite wisdom (inspired by my selfish desire not to become the permanent surrogate boob), I stuck the fading tiger up to a plump teat and held his little face there with crossed fingers. A nervous pause. Come on, little dude, support your local organic grocer – suck your mom’s teat! There was a bobbing back and forth of the little round face. And then, Eureka ! We made contact.

As soon as fading tiger took to teat, he became a boy possessed, planting his face in milk and kneading his paws. He came to life, just like that, and he was on a feeding mission. He kept going, and going. However, I had separated Mamasita from her other three kittens to give the fading tiger free reign, and now they were crying back in the box. Mamasita had a dilemma, and she eventually had to get up and tend to the ruckus. As she rose to stand, there hung fading tiger like a cartoon character, sucking and dangling. I grabbed fading tiger with my hand so that he could keep sucking without tearing her nipple off (no way he was letting go). And there you have it – a grown man shuffling around the concrete floor on his hands and knees, holding steady a scrawny kitten sucking his mama’s teat.

The mama was unbothered, oblivious to the irony of a stray cat toting around a full grown human in her wake like she was the Queen of All Things. I guess for a moment she was. Happy Mother’s Day.

 

The fading tiger drained this whole bottle in a day, about 1/3 his total body weight, and that's not counting the real mother's milk that picked up where the bottle left off.	The fading tiger finding his source. Note that he's workin' those paws. Also note how small his paw is compared to the paw of one of the larger kittens (lower left of image). He has a lot of catching up to do.
Even after the others fed themselves to sleep, the fading tiger kept on eating.	The mother - an elegantly programmed thing.

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