The following is adapted from Jack Baruth’s book, Cat Tales.

I don’t know when she made her choice. All my first glimpses of her were indistinct. A mottled white streak across a field, briefly spotlit by my truck’s high beams. One eye and ear peeking around the corner of my barn. Over the course of a month or so, as the weather improved, these fractions resolved into a complete cat. She’d low-crawl up to the outdoor food dishes when the others had finished eating, sneaking small bites as she shuddered and looked around for danger. Young, small, lean, always in motion, and absolutely terrified of people.

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But not all people, as it turns out. On Friday, our daughter easily captured what turned out to be an obviously female teenager, mostly white with grey head and back patches in the bicolor pattern known as “harlequin.” Where did she come from?

The first clue: hearing a new dog barking at the neighbor’s house. Some new woman started coming by about a month ago. Now she lives there. This disturbs my middle-class sensibilities. Anyone who moves in after just a couple months of dating, or who moves someone into their house after just a couple months of dating …

Perhaps our new bicolor girl had been a semi-tame cat at my neighbor’s house, only to be discarded in favor of this woman and her dog. It would explain both the scratches on the cat’s nose and her fondness for human companionship. But there was a bigger reason for the behavior, one that was obvious once I picked her up and held her. She was pregnant, hard-bellied, and showing a bowling-pin plan view as she ran past me to join the other cats at breakfast.

“Thousands of dollars,” my wife sighed, with a despondent expression that would have done justice to Joe “Tiger King” Exotic. “And where will they go? We have eight indoor cats already.” The obvious thing to do: Head to the vet for walk-in hours Monday morning and get it handled. 

First, however, the cat had to be named. I already had ideas about that. The previous week, I’d been given a lovely porcelain cat. It’s not........

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