Kara and Puss

Kara and Puss is an Australian story about a feral cat. There is mention of feral cat eradication programmes and a trap.

Kara and Puss

There was one act of dreadful consequence that Kara Fuji was unable to forgive herself for. Her baby boy was about eight months old. They were living out the back of Laverton in the hot, baked red, willy-willy country of Western Australia. Her man was a core sampler at a nearby nickel mine. They followed the work until her man was bored or fell out with the boss. Then they moved on. Kara Fuji had allowed a young feral cat into their lives. It had taken weeks of tid-bits and sweet nothings whispered at the cat for Puss to gain courage and confidence in this human. The emaciated little cat’s eyes were her stand-out feature; liquid lime green flecked with orange, the pupils, deep black vertical ovals, almost filling her eyes when frightened. Her coat, a tawny grey with orange tips, was striped and thin. Starting on her face, above her eyes, a black stripe flowed down her back and tail. Like a zebra, smaller stripes radiated out from her backbone and melted into dark spots on her flank. Her whiskers, long and white, twitched as she flexed her nose sniffing suspiciously. Her ears, very pointy and flea bitten, constantly flicked back and forth, twisting, listening and alert. Under her chin her fur was orange and cream, her muzzle white, her pink nose outlined in black. Kara thought her very beautiful and tiger-like. Puss had begun to purr but the fleas had to go. It took more weeks to calm the cat after the treatment scare.

The little family lived in a six-roomed single men’s quarters abandoned on the edge of town. 

A cranky Southern Cross windmill stood sentinel over the row of narrow rooms. It squealed as the blades turned slowly lifting the shaft up and down spluttering brackish water onto the dark red ground. Thin wavy white lines of salt crystals formed a perimeter when the puddle evaporated. Kara cooled herself under the spray when the day reached 40 degrees of bone-dry heat. She soaked her thin cotton frock and breathed through the fibers to moisten her parched lungs. “Like a Coolgardie Cooler” her man had said. She liked that. It made her feel Australian. She was a “Stranger in a Strange Land”, but she had fallen in love with this ancient, mysterious land. It was stark and unpredictable, seemingly void in the heat of the day, alive at night with thumps, growls, distant howling, and the endless high-pitched chirrups of cicadas.

Puss, it became obvious, was pregnant. Kara’s family of three was moving on. Her man had had enough, he disdained his boss. Kara made a place for Puss to sleep under the bed in their Kombi Van amongst the tarps and cooking gear. Her baby boy slept in his cream wicker pram lashed across the back of the front seats. It rolled slightly side to side as they bumped rattling along the corrugated dirt roads, dust streaming out behind them. Puss curled up at the foot end of the pram and baby boy, safe in his harness, stood up, holding onto the back of the seats in front, enjoying the view between his parents to the road ahead.  It was 1971. They had been married just long enough to have a child. The new job was taking them North, heading for the Pilbara. They were going to tag dingo puppies for the Ag. Department. They would be meeting up with a dogger in Nullagine. The dogger earnt his keep trapping native dogs, keeping tails and scalps for the record. The animals were deemed vermin. The Ag. Department wanted to know how many pups were in litters they might find, and Kara’s man needed to measure, weigh and check vital statistics of each pup to verify their purity as Dingoes. Pure bred dogs have no dew claws on their white front feet, they carry their tails low, and their heads are broad with a long muzzle. They are lean, strong and flexible. Pups of different colours, ranging from ginger through black and tan to creamy white, could be in the same litter. 

Puss was relaxed and fattening up with babies which arrived peacefully one night. Kara Fuji heard the cat purring in her box under the bunk. The five kittens suckled greedily, mewling if Puss moved or they got dislodged by a sibling. Kara felt a warm sisterhood with the cat. Puss had become a mother and part of their outfit. She was catered for with scraps and she enjoyed powdered milk. No fleas lined the edge of her sensitive ears. The scars were healing. The baby boy loved the feeling of her fur and cooed and giggled when Puss lay in his pram pawing him in play.

For all her worldly travels to date Kara Fuji was a naïve visitor to this new home of vast openness, shimmering mercurial horizons, craggy broken red rock outcrops and gibber stone plains. Rivers were dry, except when flash flooded after a big Wet. They were wide, tree lined ribbons snaking through bouldery, shallow beds. Clouds of budgerigars, lemon yellow and vivid bright green flashes darted chattering out of their tree perches and flashed across the view. Wedge tailed eagles soared on updraughts circling wet billabongs hunting rabbits, lizards or snakes. At night the otherwise quiet land became loud with thumps and chirrups, hoots and howling as the invisible creatures came alive and busy, enjoying the cooler air.

The kittens were growing up. Kara’s baby boy played with them, crawling over the tarp laid out in the thin shade of sandalwood trees where his Dad had made camp. They lived on the ground. Kara cooked over a twig fire with stones to support the pan and a tripod for the billy can. She was happy in her aloneness. They were moving North through open scrub country taking a break before the new job started. The baby boy was beginning to walk on the tarp holding Kara’s fingers in his chubby hand. The tawny striped kittens were playing and tumbling, squabbling about their mother’s teats.

The man was packing up camp. It was moving time again. Kara spied Puss walking off towards the creek bed with a kitten in her mouth, held by the scruff of its neck. Kara followed, concerned for their welfare, and picked the cat up putting her back into the van. She counted the kittens. Still five in the box under the bed. They motored on over the gibber plain sometimes finding a graded road and following it to a station settlement where they could replenish the jerry cans with water and buy meat and eggs. Kara made damper from flour, salt, baking soda and water and cooked it in a Dutch oven over the twig fire. Puss was content with scraps and watery powdered milk.

The last time Kara Fuji saw Puss was very early one morning at a riverbed camp near Nullagine. They were close to their new base and the man was ready to be working for wages again. Puss had a kitten in her mouth. Kara checked the box under the bed. Empty. That was the last kitten to go, and Puss had a determined look in her eyes. Kara snapped a photo as the cat looked back at her for the last time and walked off towards the creek. The man said “Let her go. She’ll be fine”. Kara felt sad. She felt deserted by this sister-mother-friend in her life. “There’s plenty of tucker for her out there” her man said.

Kara never forgave herself. She had been ambivalent about cats after she migrated from London, when she left her childhood home and Lulu, the long-haired marmalade cat she loved and grew up with. She began adventuring. Then, in Australia, she gave Puss a home. She hadn’t thought about Lulu, Puss or cats for many years. Now, fifty years after Puss went bush and having learnt the truth about cats in the environment globally, especially in Australia, she acknowledged her crime against wildlife. During those years the population of feral cats in Australia has exploded exponentially. The numbers of small birds, lizards, mammals, marsupials and insects has dramatically fallen. Kara felt the burden of her naivety her shameful ignorance and the added burden she had placed on the fragile nature of Australia’s interior. By a basic “compounding interest” formula she calculated that Puss, five kittens and she had been responsible for some 3.4 million cats in the first ten years, if each generation of females lived ten years and reproduced at least one litter of kittens a year. Natural attrition, predators and trapping would account for some decrease in the total. That was Puss and five kittens = 3.4 million cats in the wild in the first 10 years!

Later, when she became aware of the damage they caused, she took an active part in eradication programs in her adopted land of Tasmania. She knew the damage feral cats were reeking on the environment and she took pleasure in trapping one huge, sleek black, orange-eyed panther of a tom cat that roamed her property. The way it stalked low to the ground told her it was a deadly hunter. She caught it in a trap with her neighbour’s help. It was immensely satisfying and a small way to assuage her guilt of fifty years. Unlike dogs, cats climb anything and they kill naturally, not just to feed. She tells people this story in the hope that cat owners, with every right to have a cat, will be responsible. She hopes cats are kept indoors at night, and roam in an enclosed area by day, are desexed and microchipped for their own protection and are only bred under strict license. Kara Fuji knows the toll and is sorry for the environmental losses. 

1639 words

Karel Fontaine 25 February 2023