When it came to the Visiting Cats, The Cat had her own ideas about who was welcome in her garden and who wasn’t. The only male who she chased out was Longtail, but as time passed she softened towards him and later on they were even spotted napping together under the fruit trees.

Visiting female cats, however, were another matter, and, over the years, there were four on whom The Cat was willing to expend precious energy and chase out of the garden. When The Cat chased someone, she did it wholeheartedly; she was amazingly fast and fleet of paw and would not hesitate to claw and bite, if she deemed it necessary.

Two of these instances happened while both The Cat and the other female were heavily pregnant. To be fair, hormone levels were running high, and The Cat was doubtless protecting her garden (and potential kitten nursery) from what she saw as invasion by others.

The first occurrence involved Visitor Cat who had come to the garden to eat. The Cat (who was highly skilled in the art of the surprise attack) promptly cornered Visitor under the water tank from where Visitor Cat escaped only when the humans arrived to diffuse the situation. To underline her point, The Cat then pursued Visitor through the garden until she left. In the months following, this plant-ledge was as close as Visitor felt was safe, but with some dry food on the top of the wall as snacks (as pictured in the header photo) plus bowls brought to her at feeding times, she managed to visit regularly for food while not incensing the matriarch of the garden.

A couple of years later, history was repeated when Kiwi hoped to have her litter in the garden. This was an anathema to The Cat, and she fought Kiwi tooth and claw and drove her out of the garden; all of this was very tricky for Kiwi as she was a CH cat and not as agile or lithe as The Cat (plus she was heavily pregnant). Kiwi had her kittens in the prickly pear bushes in the fields and was always wary when she occasionally visited the garden after that time.

It was always a mystery as to why The Cat disliked Supervisor Cat so much. Supervisor came from across the fields; she never interacted with any other cats or went out of her way to antagonise The Cat, yet The Cat detested her. Even when Supervisor was on the garden wall, The Cat would shadow her, watching her every move with distrust, following Supervisor around the walls until Supervisor decided it was time to jump back down into the field.

And finally there was Phantom. Phantom was a petite female, abandoned in the fields by her mother at only a few months old. She made her home in the fields opposite and had no desire to live in the garden. But still, on the rare occasions that she visited the garden at feeding time (she usually ate in the drive or path), The Cat would seek her out and make it quite clear that Phantom was not welcome and, Phantom being a clever girl, would run for her life, knowing that The Cat would stop at nothing to drive her away.

This windowsill at the end of the drive was a safe place for Phantom (and her kitten Splendid, pictured here) to eat. On the other side of the glass lay The Cat’s garden, accessed by jumping up from the wall on the top right of the photo. The Cat was never aggressive towards Phantom’s offspring, only towards Phantom herself.

The Cat may have seemed content and relaxed but the reality was that she remained at heart a feral cat, willing to fight just as hard as any alpha-male to protect her domain and her family, and there was nothing any human could do to change this.