Introducing Huck!

I'm sure most of you are dying to know all about our new cat, Huckleberry Finn, Huck for short. I named him after one of my favorite literary characters because the cat was about half-wild when we got him, and we're doing our best to civilize him. We had a time catching him! He was one of four half-grown kittens living out in the country in a cat wonderland, at my new stepsister's house. I managed to pick Huck up for a second before he got scared, and then Grant, my mom's husband, grabbed him from me, and oh man did Grant get it! His wrists and hands got scratched up and the cat peed down Grant's jeans, and I thought Grant was going to break the poor cat's back, he was holding him so tight! Anyway, it's taken a few days of Huck hiding out in the garage under a portable clothes closet, us petting him by sticking our arms underneath. But today, he actually came inside and stayed out in the open for a while, not crouching underneath something. And now, when I go into the garage, he comes out to me!

Claire LOVES him, I mean will try to crawl anywhere he does just to try to touch him. And suprisingly enough, she hasn't been scratched yet. She's really pretty gentle, if perhaps a bit sudden in her attacks of gentleness. I tried to capture in this video how excited Claire was to see him--she had just woken up, and it was like she was thrilled to discover he was still at our house. She just followed him around saying "dat" and "mow" (meow) and trying to touch him and doing her happy dance. I kind of caught the tail-end of her excitement here, but you get the idea.

We're hoping Huck is going to be a good mouser, considering we've got a serious problem with those disgusting little rodents right now. After I bought traps, we caught three mice and a frighteningly huge rat in four days, all of these in our garage and Jay's shop building. And we sometimes hear noises in our pantry that sound like the scritchy-scratchy of a rodent. Chills up my spine!! Mice completely FREAK me out, I mean, almost to the point of tears. I'm really a little ashamed to admit that, but they just seem so dirty and creepy to me!

Shadow has not yet had the pleasure of meeting Huck; we've so far kept the cat strictly in the garage, our house, or in the front yard. We really hope they can learn to be friends, despite the genetic pecking order.