Letting the Cat <i> Into </i> the Bag Is No Easy Assignment

In her View commentary the other day (“All I Want for Christmas Is a Minute’s Peace”), Megan Rosenfeld described the seasonal frenzy that drives women “way out into the ozone.”

She called it “Christmas stress” and suggested that it afflicts women more than men, because men tend “to walk around thinking Christmas is something in the distant future,” while women go crazy trying to get everything done.

Rosenfeld’s scenario certainly fits our house, except that she didn’t mention one factor that has complicated Christmas for us this year. I mean cats. Rosenfeld mentioned cats only as a metaphor for the Christmas syndrome: “It feels like a hot cat sitting on your chest, threatening to suck the breath out of you like a vacuum cleaner.”

The cats in our Christmas are real. They are not on our chest. They are on our front porch. They are five wild cats, though one has been tamed, which only adds to our frustration. My wife feeds them every morning.

They are a motley mother cat, her three black kittens, and the tame one--an orange male my wife took in from a previous wild litter, and, with great patience, tamed to the point where he can be picked up, if he’s in the mood. He is tame only in a limited sense. He is mean, pugnacious, selfish, solitary, recalcitrant and greedy. He is part of the problem.

The problem is that we are trying to catch the mother cat and the three kittens (now several months old) to have them neutered. It’s the only defense we have against yet more litters.

My wife rented a trap for $3 a day. It is made of steel wire and sheet metal, about four feet long, and looks like the Wright brothers’ first airplane, with flip-up doors at either end and a spring plate in the middle.

First you have to get the cat in the box. When it steps on the spring the doors slam shut. We lured one of the black cats into the box with a bit of mackerel. It made a terrible furor, screeching and whirling about and sticking its legs out through the webbing. My wife drove it down to the vet. She had to leave it overnight. We assumed the vet would tranquilize it with a shot before operating.

“It’s a male,” he told my wife.

“How do you know?” she asked. We had never known.

He told her. Specifically.

We had bought three collars to mark the neutered cats. The next day she brought the cat home; it wore a red collar. We baited the box again, but no luck.

“I’ll pick one up and stuff her in it,” I told my wife.

With the box open nearby I reached down and grabbed one of the black cats by the middle. It turned into a ball of fury. It dug its claws into my hands and wrists. I dropped it. Immediately the blood spurted from half a dozen wounds. The cat fled.

Miraculously, a second black cat ventured into this infernal machine and we trapped it. The noise the cat made was demoralizing.

When my wife went to pick it up the next day, she could hear it yowling. The vet had given it a name. Noisy Cat. It was a male.

We have yet to capture the other black cat or the mother. The tame male compounds the problem because he has no fear of the trap. But we don’t want him. The mother cat came into the house the other day and we slammed the door. She had never been trapped inside before.

In her panic she put on a show that was galvanizing. She ripped along the window sills, riffling the metal shutters. She leaped up on tables, scattering objets d’art. She scooted through the rooms. She hid under the bed. She tried to jump through the windows. We threw the door open and finally she streaked out.

We have yet to catch the third black cat. My wife thinks it is a male too. I don’t know why. Meanwhile, she is trying to address 300 Christmas cards, wrap presents, do her shopping, dress for parties, microwave our dinners, pay the bills, carry out the trash and do all the other chores of Christmas.

We have no hope of ever catching the mother cat.

Merry Christmas.