Last week, my mother-in-law was standing in the courtyard next to our house when she received a call from her eldest son who just so happens to be passionate about hunting. He had just shot fourteen turtledoves and his wife (smart woman that she is) didn't want anything to do with them. He was calling to see if he could drop by later to give them to his mother. Not one to waste, she sighed and accepted the so-called gift.
Now, I am not a farm girl. My parents both grew up in farming communities in Western Washington and therefore spent their childhood and adolescence doing farm things such as milking cows, falling into manure pits, and showing sheep at county fairs. I, however, grew up in a suburb of Seattle. We visited our grandparents regularly and often helped out with things like feeding the cows, but it all remained vaguely quaint. We didn’t have to do any of the grunt work or muck out pens and we certainly never had to butcher animals or anything like that. To get back to the turtledoves, I know that my mother-in-law goes non-stop from dawn to dusk and so I bravely offered to help her clean them the next morning. "After all," I said to myself, "I may not be a farm girl, but I don't get squeamish about cleaning fish."
What a production. The next morning, I dutifully showed up in the garage, donned a pair of rubber gloves, and starting plucking feathers. My stomach heaved slightly at the sight of the birds’ broken necks and I stepped outside for some fresh air. When I explained this to my mother-in-law, she nodded and proceeded to chop off one of the heads: THWACK! "There," she said handing the bird to me, "the head's gone. Is that better?" To my surprise, it was better. As we companiably plucked birds and chatted, one of the cats, Ramaillou, came strutting into the garage.
Ramaillou is the young male in our cat tribe and is always into everything and magically turns up anytime something is going on. This time, he had clearly caught scent of the birds and was meowing ceaselessly, even going so far as to jump onto the table to try to snatch a snack. We tried shooing him away. We tried locking him out, but he got back in through a window. Finally, in exasperation, my mother-in-law told me to dunk him in a pot of cold water that was on standby for canning later. (I realize that this may sound like animal cruelty, but the water was lukewarm and not very deep so he wasn't going to drown or anything.) Utterly fed up, I grabbed Ramaillou and plopped him into the pot. He emitted a strangled, “MeOW!” and in one great leap, had jumped from the pot of water into the middle of the feather pile on the table and triumphantly seized one of the dead birds in his jaws. Let me tell you, a feather-covered cat is a sight to behold. His victory, however, was short-lived. As my mother-in-law wrestled the bird from Ramaillou, I grabbed hold of him once more and hefted the scoundrel back into the pot of water. With a howl, he knocked over the pot of water in his escape attempt, spilling gallons of water across the floor, and took to the hills, loudly meowing his discontent as he ran off trailing feathers. The garage looked like someone had had a pillow fight in a swimming pool. Between laughing fits, my mother-in-law and I eventually restored our workplace to order and finished our bird business.
A few days ago, Nico's hunting brother called again, this time with 35 turtledoves. My mother-in-law didn't ask me to come help and I didn't offer.
