Ms. PetraFied: le plus petit chatton

One day Jessie and I were at work when Martin and Sophie came to visit.

They brought a cat.

They said they found the little animal behind a snow shovel outside the Centre des Arts where they work. No tags, no tattoos.

I said "Let's call him (insert stupid name I've already forgotten here)"

and Sophie says, "No, his name is Bâtard, we've been calling him that all day. He'll get confused if we change it."

Bâtard means Bastard in English, and I'm sure that now that you know this you're thinking it is a quite obvious translation. We're about 60% sure Bâtard was a male cat.

Bâtard is a super friendly cat who likes to have his face scratched and enjoys various meats and dairy products, two qualities of most felines in general. He is in no way agressive and appeared to be in a permanent state of calm one might associate with the smoking of marijuana, had he been a homosapien.

We discovered these facts when Martin and Sophie brought him home from work that evening. He wouldn't leave them alone, apparently.

Antoine is allergic to cats though, and sort of had a strong urge to kick the precious feline, so we kept Bâtard in the garage for a little while. Then we decided that cats we designed by our creator/evolution to withstand the elements of the out of doors, and so we let him go in our backyard. Sam and I went to the post office and watched Bâtard walk down the street in the opposite direction.

One would assume this is the end of Bâtard the grey cat, but that is not so.

The next morning as we were eating breakfast we could hear a very distinct meowing coming from inside our house; and although Julian is rather famous for his ultra-realistic animal impersonations, he was on the other side of the house. After checking the general exterior of our vicinity we opened the door to our basement and a small kitten was sitting on the steps looking up at us like we were superior beings. Hello, Bâtard.

We put him outside.

Not three minutes later we found him in our basement again, looking homeless and affectionate.

We played this game for about 20 minutes before we came to the conclusion there would have to be different measures executed in order to rid ourselves from this bastard cat we'd acquired. There is an open pipe from inside our basement and the little chatton would crawl through it to come see his new friends.

That afternoon we were heading out to play games in the snow like small, hyperactive children so we took Bâtard with us. Sophie brought some ham to guide the clingy feline out from under our porch. She took him back to the Centre des Arts and left some more ham to deter him from his love of stalking.

We walked over to the highschool and played a game of snow soccer, which I don't recommend doing when the most recent snowfall was more than three weeks prior. The snow fully tried to fracture our ribs, I know it.

We split up afterwards, some going for coffee and others going home. Sophie, Jessie, Martin and others were walking through the trails behind the field after coffee and Sophie claimed to hear more meowing. The when they rounded the corner they saw Bâtard again, sitting in the middle of a bridge.

Does anyone remember that song from elementary school "The Cat Came Back"?? Because if you do I hope you've been playing it as a theme song for the duration of this post.

That was actually the last we saw of Bâtard the grey cat with the attachment problem.

But he started a trend for homeless/lost cats everywhere.

The very next day a smelly ginger cat who enjoyed our warm house came for a visit. He was not very friendly and really just wanted to take advantage of our house and eat our food, sort of like a really annoying, distant relative. Jessie had to run at him at high speeds to evict him from our house.