Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
roberta the Bobcat
here is the bobcat we raised about 40 yrs ago,
This true story was written by my mother, Wilma Robinson
LIFE WITH ROBERTA
We first met Roberta when she was about three weeks old, barely able to drink by herself. Her mother had been killed and she and her orphaned brother were brought down from the local mountains in an attempt to save them from starvation, or worse. The little male was kept by his rescuers and the female was given to us to raise.Since our home had always had its share of orphaned wildlife, either recuperating from broken legs or wings, or just temporarily unable to fend for themselves, the small bobcat was received with open arms.
From the beginning Roberta let us know who was to be the boss. The strange surroundings she was in and the stranger companions who shared the place with her were accepted immediately, but on her own terms. Our mother cat, with a new litter of kittens, became her best friend and sparring partner. Roberta became official babysitter for the kittens and whenever one of them would blindly wander from the group she would grab it by the scruff of the neck and drag it back to the litter. In spite of the rough treatment the kittens all survived and she loved every one of them. But her real love was Sunkist, our big orange tomcat. Roberta fell in love with him when she was a little over a year old, but he steadfastly refused her advances. She would bounce hopefully behind him, mewing gutteral sweet-nothings and patting playfully at his hindquarters, but he would quietly ignore her. She never gave up but neither did he and, while he would sleep curled up on the couch with her, he would go no further than friendship.
During her first year with us, Roberta met a variety of farm animals which, on our farm, were not penned up but were allowed to wander freely around the yard and nearby orchard. Our small flock of Pekin ducks became her first victims. At first sight of the flock, she would flatten out in the grass, taking advantage of any slight depression in the ground. Her ears would be folded back tightly against her head and her heavy hindquarters would be spread flat against the ground as though on a hinge. Her big eyes never moved from their quarry. She was a trap just waiting to be sprung! All of this looked very professional except for that stubby little tail excitedly whipping back and forth behind her like a semaphore signaling danger with every twitch! The ducks, as yet much larger than she was, would cock an interested eye in her direction and, seeing nothing but a kitten, would waddle away unconcerned.
This fruitless stalking of the ducks ended abruptly one day when Roberta was about a year old. We had gone to town leaving her in the yard as usual but when we returned she was nowhere to be found. After a short search we discovered her under one of the many blackberry bushes in the area. She was standing guard over
the dead body of a duck, growling fiercely but looking rather puzzled. She came out when we spoke to her, and upon examining the duck, we discovered that she had removed nearly all the feathers from it but hadn’t touched the flesh! Apparently she didn’t know what to do next. After this incident, she tried to attack some of the other animals we had running loose around the farm. First she tried the rabbits. We had about half a dozen white rabbits living in the yard but it didn’t take them long to outsmart her. They knew from experience that she could run very fast but for only a short time, and if they could keep ahead of her until they reached the shelter of the rocks at the edge of the pasture, she would have to stop and pant, giving them time to escape. They also knew the spot where she would become winded and they would often come to a halt about thirty feet ahead of her and turn around to watch her stop for breath. Roberta always gave up at that point.
She also took one on one of the lambs we had running loose on the hill. It was about half grown, approximately three time s the size of Roberta. Behind our house was a large mossy rock, part of the rocky outcropping now known as Sheridan Hill. The sheep were halfway up the long slope when the bobcat attacked the lamb, springing from an overhanging rock to land on the top of its head. Cat and lamb went head over heels all the way down the slope, landing in a blackberry bush at the bottom. It took a great deal of physical persuasion to unclamp her from the lamb’s head even after the pummeling she took in the fall. Until then we had thought it would have been impossible for a small bobcat to kill such a large animal but we could see now that a cat could just keep chewing on the back of the lamb’s neck until it was dead. There would be no way it could dislodge a determined bobcat! This lamb, thankfully, was unharmed.
It was after she tried to take on our white-faced bull in the same manner that we decided that she should stay indoors unless we had her under our control. I made a small leather harness for her and with this and a long rope we could safely take her out for a walk and not have to worry about the livestock. At night and when we were out she was kept in the basement. The inner basement door, the one leading up to the kitchen, she soon mastered. Standing up on her hind legs and putting her big paws on either side of the door knob, she learned to twist the knob enough to unlatch it and come bouncing happily into the living room where we were innocently watching the television, completely unaware of what she was up to. Consequently, the basement door now had to be locked if we wanted her kept safely confined.
Visitors to our house were always greeted warmly by Roberta. Although she kept her throaty mews for members of our family, she would show no aversion to strangers. This almost lost us the use of our telephone when, one day the telephone repairman, in .all innocence, walked into the basement to check the fuses. Roberta had been shut in most of the day and, seeing what she assumed was a friendly back, she made her usual flying leap to his shoulders. Since she weighed a good twenty pounds or more, the blow itself was a shock to him, but when he turned his head and found himself face to face with a bobcat, his terror was complete! Hearing the commotion, I rushed down the stairs , grabbed Roberta from his shoulders and tried frantically to calm him down. Since she was now purring loudly and gazing at us with adoring eyes, his fear slowly .turned to admiration for his own bravery and when he left, it was with the anticipation of thrilling his family with a new story of the hazards of a telephone repairman.
Having Roberta confined to the house so much presented another problem. She had been tempted for months by the sight and sounds of our budgie’s cage which, suspended by a large spring, hung from the ceiling of the kitchen. A favourite trick of hers was to stand up on her hind legs with her forepaws braced against the wall, stretching as far up the wall as she could, then quickly transfer those paws from the wall to the sides of the budgie cage. One hefty downward pull and then she would suddenly let go! Cage and budgie would shoot ceilingward in a shower of seeds, water and blue feathers! The budgie would shriek, children would come running and Roberta would retire in haste under the living-room couch where she would hide out until peace was restored and the whole mess cleaned up.
Her perseverance finally paid off though when the family left the house one day after locking Roberta safely in the basement. Someone, however, forgot to lock the door leading up to the kitchen and Roberta simply turned the doorknob and came back up. When we returned, she met us in the hallway with her usual welcoming meeow, and an air of complete innocence. But upon entering the kitchen we were horrified to see the budgie cage lying smashed on the floor amid a scattered pile of birdseed and feathers! Another pile of pale blue feathers in the basement confirmed the fate of the bird. Roberta seemed very well pleased with herself, and purred contentedly the rest of the evening. She had vanquished another annoying temptation!
Keeping her supplied with meat was a bit of a problem although she seemed to thrive on canned dog food and the odd carp the boys caught in the nearby river. But believing fresh food to be the better of the two, we took her one day across the road to the Alouette River to see if she would be interested in the myriads of frogs and tadpoles along the shore. That was when we discovered how much she liked water! She paid no attention whatever to the leaping frogs but bounded out into the water and splashed about with wild abandon (as they say)! So much for cats hating water!
Realizing now her fondness for water, we thought it might be interesting to see what she would think of the ocean. Would salt water have the same attraction for her ? So one day we took her in our car, (one of her favourite pastimes) and set off for Boundary Bay Her favourite spot in the car was the long shelf at the rear window where she could watch the cars behind. Our favourite pastime was watching the faces of the people in those cars as they tried to figure out what breed of cat that was!
When we arrived at the beach we put Roberta into her harness and set off down the sand to the water. It was a windy day and the waves were rolling in from the bay and breaking with a roar on the beach. When Roberta leaped up onto the top of a pile of driftwood and saw all that water heading straight for her, she let out a roar of her own and headed in a panic for the safety of the car! No amount of persuasion would get her out onto that beach again! And so, in the interest of harmony, we ate our picnic lunch in the carpark and headed home. While she was growing up, Roberta was allowed to sleep outside with the cats or in the basement, whichever she preferred. But as she approached maturity and became a possible threat to the neighbour’s livestock, we thought it would be best to keep her in the basement at night. Our basement was peculiar in that only about one third of it was actually cemented while the remainder was composed of a natural outcropping of solid rock. Between the rock and the low cement wall of the completed part flowed a small running stream which disappeared into a large drain beneath the cement floor.As it was Roberta’s natural instinct to deposit her droppings under water, preferably running water, the stream served to keep the basement sweet. If she was outside where there was no natural running water, she would sometimes use her water bowl - to the annoyance of the boy whose job it was to keep her dishes clean!
Our youngest son, Robin, was the unhappy discoverer of another of her strange traits. After a particularly happy romp with Roberta, when they were both lying exhausted on the ground, panting from their exertions, she slowly got up, walked carefully up the length of his prone body and calmly urinated on the back of his head! We tried to make Robin feel better by telling him it was her Mark of Approval but it was a long time before he forgave her. Eventually, to his great amusement, others of us were granted this same form of approval by Roberta.
In spite of her little eccentricities, she was a funny, playful and loving companion, a bit rough, perhaps, but full of a natural exuberance hard to resist. Our two younger boys would often play in the hallway with her, between the wall and the staircase leading up to their bedrooms. They would roll a marble the length of the hall from one boy to the other with Roberta in between. As the marble came by, she would shoot out one big paw and send it smashing back to the other end. The object of the game was to get the marble past her to the boy at the other end but Roberta seldom missed the marble!
Another game was sliding down the banister. One boy would race up the stairs pursued by Roberta. When he arrived at the top of the long staircase he would fling himself up onto the wide banister and quickly slide to the bottom, leaving her panting and frustrated at the top of the stairs. But it didn’t take many trips before she learned the fast way down and she, too, would leap to the banister and with her claws raking the wooden sides, she would slide backwards all the way down to the bottom, bounce triumphantly off at the newelpost to grab his retreating pantleg and win the game. When she was not quite four years old, Roberta got into an altercation with our German Shepherd dog whom she adored. We had added a small dog {of unknown ancestry) to our menagerie and Roberta, apparently, didn’t like playing second fiddle so she took it out on the bigger dog. The two of them were rolling around, snarling and pummeling each other, looking for all the world like they were really out for blood when a bystander, taking it seriously, grabbed a two-by-four and brought it down forcibly on Roberta’s head, I caught her in a blanket and put her back in the basement. The next morning my youngest son went down to get her for her breakfast but he found her lying dead at the foot of the stairs. She had died in the night from a cracked skull.
She has been gone now for many years but we have been left with a wealth of memories, most of them humourous, some of them sad, but all of them leaving us with a soft spot for the bobcats of the world. We cannot think of them as vicious or mean, as they are often portrayed, but, rather, courageous and proud, full of the joy of living.
And at least one of them had a great sense of humour!
LIFE WITH ROBERTA
We first met Roberta when she was about three weeks old, barely able to drink by herself. Her mother had been killed and she and her orphaned brother were brought down from the local mountains in an attempt to save them from starvation, or worse. The little male was kept by his rescuers and the female was given to us to raise.Since our home had always had its share of orphaned wildlife, either recuperating from broken legs or wings, or just temporarily unable to fend for themselves, the small bobcat was received with open arms.
From the beginning Roberta let us know who was to be the boss. The strange surroundings she was in and the stranger companions who shared the place with her were accepted immediately, but on her own terms. Our mother cat, with a new litter of kittens, became her best friend and sparring partner. Roberta became official babysitter for the kittens and whenever one of them would blindly wander from the group she would grab it by the scruff of the neck and drag it back to the litter. In spite of the rough treatment the kittens all survived and she loved every one of them. But her real love was Sunkist, our big orange tomcat. Roberta fell in love with him when she was a little over a year old, but he steadfastly refused her advances. She would bounce hopefully behind him, mewing gutteral sweet-nothings and patting playfully at his hindquarters, but he would quietly ignore her. She never gave up but neither did he and, while he would sleep curled up on the couch with her, he would go no further than friendship.
During her first year with us, Roberta met a variety of farm animals which, on our farm, were not penned up but were allowed to wander freely around the yard and nearby orchard. Our small flock of Pekin ducks became her first victims. At first sight of the flock, she would flatten out in the grass, taking advantage of any slight depression in the ground. Her ears would be folded back tightly against her head and her heavy hindquarters would be spread flat against the ground as though on a hinge. Her big eyes never moved from their quarry. She was a trap just waiting to be sprung! All of this looked very professional except for that stubby little tail excitedly whipping back and forth behind her like a semaphore signaling danger with every twitch! The ducks, as yet much larger than she was, would cock an interested eye in her direction and, seeing nothing but a kitten, would waddle away unconcerned.
This fruitless stalking of the ducks ended abruptly one day when Roberta was about a year old. We had gone to town leaving her in the yard as usual but when we returned she was nowhere to be found. After a short search we discovered her under one of the many blackberry bushes in the area. She was standing guard over
the dead body of a duck, growling fiercely but looking rather puzzled. She came out when we spoke to her, and upon examining the duck, we discovered that she had removed nearly all the feathers from it but hadn’t touched the flesh! Apparently she didn’t know what to do next. After this incident, she tried to attack some of the other animals we had running loose around the farm. First she tried the rabbits. We had about half a dozen white rabbits living in the yard but it didn’t take them long to outsmart her. They knew from experience that she could run very fast but for only a short time, and if they could keep ahead of her until they reached the shelter of the rocks at the edge of the pasture, she would have to stop and pant, giving them time to escape. They also knew the spot where she would become winded and they would often come to a halt about thirty feet ahead of her and turn around to watch her stop for breath. Roberta always gave up at that point.
She also took one on one of the lambs we had running loose on the hill. It was about half grown, approximately three time s the size of Roberta. Behind our house was a large mossy rock, part of the rocky outcropping now known as Sheridan Hill. The sheep were halfway up the long slope when the bobcat attacked the lamb, springing from an overhanging rock to land on the top of its head. Cat and lamb went head over heels all the way down the slope, landing in a blackberry bush at the bottom. It took a great deal of physical persuasion to unclamp her from the lamb’s head even after the pummeling she took in the fall. Until then we had thought it would have been impossible for a small bobcat to kill such a large animal but we could see now that a cat could just keep chewing on the back of the lamb’s neck until it was dead. There would be no way it could dislodge a determined bobcat! This lamb, thankfully, was unharmed.
It was after she tried to take on our white-faced bull in the same manner that we decided that she should stay indoors unless we had her under our control. I made a small leather harness for her and with this and a long rope we could safely take her out for a walk and not have to worry about the livestock. At night and when we were out she was kept in the basement. The inner basement door, the one leading up to the kitchen, she soon mastered. Standing up on her hind legs and putting her big paws on either side of the door knob, she learned to twist the knob enough to unlatch it and come bouncing happily into the living room where we were innocently watching the television, completely unaware of what she was up to. Consequently, the basement door now had to be locked if we wanted her kept safely confined.
Visitors to our house were always greeted warmly by Roberta. Although she kept her throaty mews for members of our family, she would show no aversion to strangers. This almost lost us the use of our telephone when, one day the telephone repairman, in .all innocence, walked into the basement to check the fuses. Roberta had been shut in most of the day and, seeing what she assumed was a friendly back, she made her usual flying leap to his shoulders. Since she weighed a good twenty pounds or more, the blow itself was a shock to him, but when he turned his head and found himself face to face with a bobcat, his terror was complete! Hearing the commotion, I rushed down the stairs , grabbed Roberta from his shoulders and tried frantically to calm him down. Since she was now purring loudly and gazing at us with adoring eyes, his fear slowly .turned to admiration for his own bravery and when he left, it was with the anticipation of thrilling his family with a new story of the hazards of a telephone repairman.
Having Roberta confined to the house so much presented another problem. She had been tempted for months by the sight and sounds of our budgie’s cage which, suspended by a large spring, hung from the ceiling of the kitchen. A favourite trick of hers was to stand up on her hind legs with her forepaws braced against the wall, stretching as far up the wall as she could, then quickly transfer those paws from the wall to the sides of the budgie cage. One hefty downward pull and then she would suddenly let go! Cage and budgie would shoot ceilingward in a shower of seeds, water and blue feathers! The budgie would shriek, children would come running and Roberta would retire in haste under the living-room couch where she would hide out until peace was restored and the whole mess cleaned up.
Her perseverance finally paid off though when the family left the house one day after locking Roberta safely in the basement. Someone, however, forgot to lock the door leading up to the kitchen and Roberta simply turned the doorknob and came back up. When we returned, she met us in the hallway with her usual welcoming meeow, and an air of complete innocence. But upon entering the kitchen we were horrified to see the budgie cage lying smashed on the floor amid a scattered pile of birdseed and feathers! Another pile of pale blue feathers in the basement confirmed the fate of the bird. Roberta seemed very well pleased with herself, and purred contentedly the rest of the evening. She had vanquished another annoying temptation!
Keeping her supplied with meat was a bit of a problem although she seemed to thrive on canned dog food and the odd carp the boys caught in the nearby river. But believing fresh food to be the better of the two, we took her one day across the road to the Alouette River to see if she would be interested in the myriads of frogs and tadpoles along the shore. That was when we discovered how much she liked water! She paid no attention whatever to the leaping frogs but bounded out into the water and splashed about with wild abandon (as they say)! So much for cats hating water!
Realizing now her fondness for water, we thought it might be interesting to see what she would think of the ocean. Would salt water have the same attraction for her ? So one day we took her in our car, (one of her favourite pastimes) and set off for Boundary Bay Her favourite spot in the car was the long shelf at the rear window where she could watch the cars behind. Our favourite pastime was watching the faces of the people in those cars as they tried to figure out what breed of cat that was!
When we arrived at the beach we put Roberta into her harness and set off down the sand to the water. It was a windy day and the waves were rolling in from the bay and breaking with a roar on the beach. When Roberta leaped up onto the top of a pile of driftwood and saw all that water heading straight for her, she let out a roar of her own and headed in a panic for the safety of the car! No amount of persuasion would get her out onto that beach again! And so, in the interest of harmony, we ate our picnic lunch in the carpark and headed home. While she was growing up, Roberta was allowed to sleep outside with the cats or in the basement, whichever she preferred. But as she approached maturity and became a possible threat to the neighbour’s livestock, we thought it would be best to keep her in the basement at night. Our basement was peculiar in that only about one third of it was actually cemented while the remainder was composed of a natural outcropping of solid rock. Between the rock and the low cement wall of the completed part flowed a small running stream which disappeared into a large drain beneath the cement floor.As it was Roberta’s natural instinct to deposit her droppings under water, preferably running water, the stream served to keep the basement sweet. If she was outside where there was no natural running water, she would sometimes use her water bowl - to the annoyance of the boy whose job it was to keep her dishes clean!
Our youngest son, Robin, was the unhappy discoverer of another of her strange traits. After a particularly happy romp with Roberta, when they were both lying exhausted on the ground, panting from their exertions, she slowly got up, walked carefully up the length of his prone body and calmly urinated on the back of his head! We tried to make Robin feel better by telling him it was her Mark of Approval but it was a long time before he forgave her. Eventually, to his great amusement, others of us were granted this same form of approval by Roberta.
In spite of her little eccentricities, she was a funny, playful and loving companion, a bit rough, perhaps, but full of a natural exuberance hard to resist. Our two younger boys would often play in the hallway with her, between the wall and the staircase leading up to their bedrooms. They would roll a marble the length of the hall from one boy to the other with Roberta in between. As the marble came by, she would shoot out one big paw and send it smashing back to the other end. The object of the game was to get the marble past her to the boy at the other end but Roberta seldom missed the marble!
Another game was sliding down the banister. One boy would race up the stairs pursued by Roberta. When he arrived at the top of the long staircase he would fling himself up onto the wide banister and quickly slide to the bottom, leaving her panting and frustrated at the top of the stairs. But it didn’t take many trips before she learned the fast way down and she, too, would leap to the banister and with her claws raking the wooden sides, she would slide backwards all the way down to the bottom, bounce triumphantly off at the newelpost to grab his retreating pantleg and win the game. When she was not quite four years old, Roberta got into an altercation with our German Shepherd dog whom she adored. We had added a small dog {of unknown ancestry) to our menagerie and Roberta, apparently, didn’t like playing second fiddle so she took it out on the bigger dog. The two of them were rolling around, snarling and pummeling each other, looking for all the world like they were really out for blood when a bystander, taking it seriously, grabbed a two-by-four and brought it down forcibly on Roberta’s head, I caught her in a blanket and put her back in the basement. The next morning my youngest son went down to get her for her breakfast but he found her lying dead at the foot of the stairs. She had died in the night from a cracked skull.
She has been gone now for many years but we have been left with a wealth of memories, most of them humourous, some of them sad, but all of them leaving us with a soft spot for the bobcats of the world. We cannot think of them as vicious or mean, as they are often portrayed, but, rather, courageous and proud, full of the joy of living.
And at least one of them had a great sense of humour!
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