Tambë is yet another foundling from my stray feeder. I started seeing her at the feeder in early autumn of 2003, when she was just a tiny kitten. Although I saw her repeatedly (if briefly -- she always ran when I looked out), I never saw any sign of a mother cat or littermates; she was always alone.

I began to worry about such a little thing being all on her own, figuring that she might have been orphaned or lost. Finally in October I decided to round her up and see whether she could be tamed. She was fairly easy to trap, and while she was very wild and fierce to begin with, it was only a couple of days before she started purring. (Persistent petting and a few bribes of tuna and salmon can work wonders with a feral kitten.)

When I took her in for her first exam at the vet's, I figured Tambë was about ten weeks old, based on her size. It was rather a shock when the vet looked at her teeth and pronounced her to be about four months old. She was healthy, but very small.

Tambë settled into the household very nicely, playing with Gilmith (who is about a month older) and the other younger cats, and snuggling up to the two big orange boys, Red and Claudius. She has grown up to be rather plump but is still very small, only a bit larger than Nanaia. Tambë has a natural bobtail, a characteristic very common among the strays in my neighborhood, thanks largely to a big bobtailed tom who used to live on the next street and whose genetic heritage shows up for blocks around. Since adopting Tambë I have seen two other unusually small bobtails hanging around my backyard and the garage stray feeder, both of them too wild to catch: one orange, one tabby-and-white. They're probably littermates of Tambë's.