CHAPTER XXII
THE RING-TAILED CAT
THE children missed Fuzzy-Wuzz these days, the more so as Dapple, the fawn, had to spend the winter in the barn with the cows. They could not have her indoors, of course.
The Ranger found a litter of ring-tailed kittens. The kits are generally born in June, and this was October, so that they were half grown. Their mother and the two larger kittens ran away as the Ranger reached into their den in the hollow tree, but the littlest one was not quick enough.
Now the Ranger remembered his grandfather telling of the days of Forty-nine, when he joined the gold rush to California. He had had a ring-tailed cat for a pet.
Building his rude log cabin somewhere about these very mountains while he washed the precious metal out of the gravel of the creek beds, he noticed that his supplies were being pilfered, and thinking it must be a fox, he set a trap.
He was awakened in the middle of the night by the most curious sound,—half the bark a small dog makes, and half yowl. Looking to see what he had in his trap, that he could put it out of its misery, he found an animal that he at first took to be a house cat. Then he noticed that it was longer, and had a much longer tail, and shorter legs. The most curious part of it was that the tail was striped black and white, like a ’coon’s. Its face, too, was pointed like that of a raccoon. Instead of the mischievous eyes peering from a black mask that a ’coon seems to have, this animal had large, gentle looking eyes and looked scared to death.
He learned later that it was a ’coon cat, or civet, more commonly called the ring-tail cat.
“There, there, pussy,” he soothed her, as he released her from the trap and carried her into his cabin. “You just come on in here and have some fish, and we’ll bury the hatchet. I need a cat to keep the field mice out of my grub,” and he straightway adopted her.
She was easy to tame. She generally slept all day and chased mice all night,—of which an abundance were attracted by his pantry shelf. She also showed her likeness to the raccoon by her fondness for fruit and sugar.