Cat of the Week: Cybèle

By an edhat reader

Cybèle is French and entitled–and she knows it! She showed up howling at our French house a year ago, a three-month-old tortoiseshell kitten. It was dark and I wasn’t sure who was making the noise, but I’m easy and I invited her into the garage. A filthy mess she was, covered in field grasses, burrs, and stinging nettles. I fed and watered her and left her in the garage in the comfy Italian cat house for the night. The next morning she was perfectly clean!

We tried finding a home for her (five friends had vacancies in the cat department) to no avail. She was too young to leave with our two resident cats, who cordially despised her, without much human company for our three-month absence. So she came to Santa Barbara. She loved the carrier, the train, the hotel, the airplane, the stewardesses, and the rental car ride to Santa Barbara (she sat in the back window). Poor 21-year-old Molly (also a tortie) had just died, so there was a vacancy here.

From her behavior we thought Cybèle might have been a gypsy cat, for les gitanes often use pretty little things to solicit donations (“for their upkeep”) and then abandon the animals in a field when they start to get bigger. For a female she is a hellion, and she can’t understand why she can’t stay out and rave all night. There is no word for coyote in French (there being no coyotes in France).