Whitefur, Greyfur and Blackfur (aka The Furries) were six months old. They still spent most of their time in the garden although they were able to scale the trees and walls to get to the fields if they so wished (but they were always back home in time for breakfast or tea). They were closely bonded, yet very different in their characters; maybe they went their separate ways during the day, but they still had a strong feeling of family.

The Cat was a content mother, but her style of mothering was very different to that of her daughter Sprocket the previous year, when they had shared a colony.

Sprocket had been a very organised and methodical cat who liked to know exactly where each kitten was and what they were doing at any given time. The family had rendezvous points in case anyone got lost, and every outing was organised by Sprocket with military precision. You could almost hear The Cat sighing and rolling her eyes at her daughter who she thought was massively overprotective of their brood.

The Cat, on the other hand, would sit on the garden wall at dusk, where the kittens (or juniors, as they now were) were welcome to join her to embark in an evening of hunting and prowling in the fields. If the juniors weren’t there when The Cat decided to leave (and there were no clues as to when that might be), they were left behind.

It seemed like tough love, but self-sufficiency was key. The juniors were learning to hunt, to be independent and to fend for themselves in true feral fashion, and they brought the skills they learnt with their mother in the fields at night back to the garden where they practised their locust- and beetle-catching techniques.

Most importantly, The Cat was making them think for themselves, which was exactly how she had raised Sprocket. She was equipping them with everything they might need for an independent life, for survival as a feral cat.