Showdown at the Mostly OK Corral

It’s like the wild, wild west around here.

After nearly a week kept confined to Kim’s office, Midgie – who will likely remain “Midgie” at this point, since no progress whatsoever has been made on the renaming project and every day that passes without alternative names makes such progress that much less probable – has been let out to face Mithra.

This wasn’t entirely intentional.

No, I meant to let her out. That part was intentional. But I also meant to keep Mithra in Kim’s office while Midgie was exploring, in order to cut down on the potential for feline violence. This is when I discovered that the door on Kim’s office – which has never shut properly – cannot be wedged closed hard enough to keep Mithra in there if Mithra does not choose to be in there.

And Mithra most definitely does not choose to be in there, thank you very freaking much.

So both cats have been lurking around the house since Wednesday, off and on. Midgie mostly slinks – she has short, stubby legs the way Tria used to, and she’s low to the ground under the best of circumstances. Mithra, for her part, stalks, with all of the affronted dignity of a silent film grand dame at a television studio.

Slink. Stalk. Slink. Stalk. Slink. Stalk.

And then – WHAM! There they are, suddenly facing each other.

The light changes quality. The clocks magically reset to high noon. Somewhere, somebody starts whistling. We have no tumbleweeds to blow by, so we have to make do with dust bunnies. There is a tense calm.

Eventually the calm is shattered by growling and hissing – mostly from Mithra, who does not really get along with other cats, but also from Midgie, who didn’t survive behind bars in the pound just to be pushed around by some kittypet on the outside, no she did not. So far nothing has come of this, and we’ve done our best to make sure that nothing comes of it. We’re hoping it quiets down eventually.

Add into this the fact that Midgie cannot possibly be the full two years old that the pound insisted she was – she looks, sounds and acts like a cat barely beyond kitten stage. This means that even during the growling and hissing, she wants to PLAY! Playing, in this context, generally entails flying at Mithra with all of the ferocious abandon of a Nerf dart, and with about as much effectiveness against that hardened target too.

And then there are the rabbits.

Hazel is easily Mithra’s size and nearly half again Midgie’s, so when she’s out the three of them just stand there in an equilateral triangle, glowering at each other. Milo is smaller. Mithra just watches him, but Midgie is convinced he will play with her if she chases him enough. Milo, it must be said, is not on board with this, and he does what rabbits naturally do when stressed, which is poop all over everything.

I’m not sure why this is a defense mechanism, really. Are they hoping their pursuers will slip on it? It has been effective at keeping Midgie at bay so far, though, so perhaps Milo is on to something.

Round and round, in and out, stalk, slink, Nerf, hiss, growl, poop, repeat.

It’s how the Midwest was won.