Cu Chulain

Our best guess is that Cu was born in June of 1996. We named him for his tendency to attack anything that moves. This included Bast, when they first met. I was moving from Ann Arbor back to Kalamazoo for a year, and thought for a while that I would have to have some friends take Bast during that time. Of course, I finally decided that this was totally unacceptable and found a different apartment, but in the meanwhile the friends in question had found a kitten. When I came to pick Bast up I found him downstairs sitting very calmly while a tiny ball of grey fluff bounced off his chest. Every now and then Bast reached out and swatted the fluffball, who went tumbling. Nothing daunted, he always got back up and launched himself back at Bast to bounce off his chest again. It was too cute for words, and since my friends said their own cat wouldn't accept the kitten, I just had to adopt him too.

Being separated from his mother at about six weeks left Cu a bit disturbed. For one thing, since his only role model was a short-hair, he hasn't an inkling of how to keep his coat unmatted. Equally, since Bast was an only cat during much of his own kittenhood, they had some difficulty agreeing how much enthusiasm was appropriate during play... Cu tended to keep bouncing until he got hissed at. He has an absolutely unbreakable habit of peeing in inappropriate places-- the carpet if he's irrited and his own sleeping place if he's anxious. This occasionally gives rise to amusing moments, in retrospect at any rate. At one point, Cu nailed our futon right between the legs of a sleeping guest, as though to blame it on Jeremy. An oft repeated remark in our household is that it's a good thing Cu is so cute, or he'd have gone for slippers a long time ago.

Cu adjusted fairly slowly to having other felines around in Columbus and Springfield, but eventually managed to reach detante with the other neighborhood cats. Humans, on the other hand, are always popular with him, and Cu will entice snuggles from nearly anyone who walks through the door. Small children are the only exception.

Cu is a strange mix of ditziness and cunning. He's a marvellous escape artist, with the mechanical eye to figure out that he has to pull up the stakes holding the bottom of a wire fence to the dirt in order to wriggle under it. On the other hand, he has caught the end of his tail on fire and not known it. (He had walked under a table, his tail dipping forward as it hit the edge just far enough to trail in a candle.) He can jump very respectable heights with precision, but I have seen him fail to make the half meter from the seat of the couch to the coffee table because he got distracted midway. He's an accomplished hunter of sparrows and mice, but he invariably brings the birds inside and lets them go there so he can catch them again in an enclosed space. He hunts for toys not food.

Where Bast was Death of Plants, Cu is endowed with the Tail O' Doom. He often carries his tail upright with a curl-over at the tip, and this is an excellent tool for hooking things off tables or trailing cat hairs in dinner plates and drinking vessels. Sometimes the latter merely precedes the former.

Cu has changeable moods. When he's feeling standoffish he will bite if disturbed. When he's feeling snuggly, he will snuggle for hours even if his snugglee moves around. He very much enjoys perching on a height, but also any den-like arrangement including the middle shelf of the bookshelves. He has a strange predeliction for sleeping on the corners of books and on plastic bags. He is our quirky cat.