Author Archives: Le Maitre de Frimousse

On the other side of the village

Cannelle [Cinnamon] was RouXy’s mum. She used to live on the other side of the village. She was very young when she gave birth to RouXy. We haven’t seen her for about two years so we suppose she must have died. And there is often another cat near Cannelle’s Masters’ house.

Cannelle’s Masters have found a solution for the new cat (*) to come in and out of the house without a flap. Look at the photo.

(*) Well, we don’t know how Cannelle would go in and out of their house.

 

 

May 13th

Yesterday was May 13th.

Some will remember a particular May 13th (click here).

But, on May 13th, our GEO perpetual calendar A photo (of cat) a day, there’s a flamboyant ginger cat, who reminds us of someone, whom we’ll never forget.

Quick translation below.

[Quiet as an alley cat

Free to do what they please all day long, alley cats settle on the roofs of the highest houses, favourite observation posts. The slightest rustle of wings or the races of the rodents trying to escape under the tiles are for them the start signal of a chase that belongs to playing and hunting.

80000 is considered the number of alley cats living in Paris today.]

 

 

 

 

Problem

Our neighbour at the top of our lane has two dogs. The mother, Hiris, was a very good friend of cats, RouXy in particular. He would spend hours near Hiris’s house (photo top of the page).

Hiris had two plethoric litters. One young female is left, which, and it is symptomatic, has no name. She was a puppy when RouXy died.

Now, she is an adult, and Hiris is kept with a chain because otherwise both dogs will go away and eventually be found several days later.

Last weekend Hiris was not tied and the nephew RouXy’s Master saw both dogs near the reservoir, 500 meters over the village, eating something. He came nearer, defying the growls of the younger bitch. They weren’t eating a young roe deer, they were eating a ginger cat! It is not really normal that dogs having food at their disposal at home attack a cat to eat it. And Hiris was used to cats.

What’s to be done? Tell Hiris’s Master? RouXy’s Master, who has known him since he was a kid, will go and tell him maybe, without illusions. Because which solution? Hiris was for his children but the children have gone … We speak about dogs and cats being abandoned on car parks of motorways, at entrances of stations or supermarkets. It is terrible. But there is another less rough but very harmful sort of abandonment for dogs: plenty of owners do not care for their dogs, except food, when they remember.

 

 

The kitties

Little Frimousse arrived at our house one day of October of the year 2000. He came from we don’t know where, but he entered our lives. Both of us worked and little Frimousse was often alone and sad. In July of the following year we moved to live here and Frimousse found little RouXy, a kitten no more than two months old. And they spent their whole lives in this hamlet of a small village of Haute-Savoie. They went elsewhere only very rarely, to Annecy to Frimousse’s doctor‘s surgery mainly. If Frimousse accompanied us twice in Lorraine, once near the Riviera and once near Spain, both spent one week’s holiday with us in Bessans, in the mountains, in October, 2002. Very often Jump, the collie, spent a few days with us, and they were very happy.

If Frimousse, with his PetSafe system, could not leave the house nor the garden, RouXy would tour the village every day, and every evening we had the anxiety not to see him returning. At the age of one year he had a leg caught in a jaw trap in a barn less than a hundred meters from our house. He almost died.

We found Tigri in a ravine 700 meters from the house in October, 2002. How had he arrived there? We have never known that of course. But Tigri lived his nine-year life with us, here. He never left except for medical attention in Annecy during his last two years of his life.

Yellow flowers bloom in the garden at the moment, for Frimousse, RouXy, Tigri and Jump. When we see the little village, when we think of these three kitties and this good dog, we think of the huge place they take in our memories.

 

 

 

Nearly April 1st

 

Tits haven’t lost their habit to come on our window sill for sunflower seeds. Sparrows also come, nuthatches and finches also. For a couple of days a magnificent bullfinch, not fearful at all, has come too, and another kind of magnificent small birds whose name I still don’t know.

Tits? On April 1st 2016, RouXy had spotted that there were baby tits in the nesting box, and he wished to pay them a visit. A gastronomic visit.