Rolling Dog Farm Blog

You may remember that last autumn our blind cat Cinder gave birth to two kittens a few months after arriving from the Bitterroot Humane Association in Hamilton, Montana.  (We didn’t know she was pregnant when we agreed to take her.)  We had found a home for one kitten, but that fell through, and the other kitten we had planned to add to the sanctuary "staff" as a barn cat.  So we ended up with two new staff additions. 

Alayne took this photo of the kitten we named Spark, checking things out in a very wet and muddy corral yesterday.  Spark is the very assertive one of the pair.  Her sister, Ash, is not nearly as confident or as outgoing, but both love to explore.  Our other barn cats stick to their territory — Smoke and his sisters Smudge and Skitter hang out at Lena’s Barn, while Joshua and Rocky never venture far from Beauty’s Barn.  Ash and Spark, on the other hand, go everywhere … basically, wherever we are, they are.  As we make our rounds from barn to barn, corral to corral, these two girls follow us along.  And some nights Spark will even sleep in Beauty’s Barn.

Like Cinder their Mom, Spark and Ash have small frames, bright green eyes, short stubby tails with a kink in the end,  and extra toes on each foot.  Spark is the one who got Cinder’s bossy, take-charge personality, though, and she’s been busy bossing the other barn cats around, even though they are all much bigger and older than she is.  In the animal world, it’s all about attitude.  And as we certainly know, the smaller they are, the more attitude they have!

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While Alayne had the camera out, she also got this interesting shot looking across the corrals to the mountains of the Scapegoat Wilderness.  She was struck by how the contours of the white horse — our old, blind guy Shasta — kind of looked like the ridgeline of the mountains.  The fresh snow had arrived in a big spring storm Monday.  We had a few inches of snow at the ranch Monday night and plenty of rain on top of it, so we were happily drenched.  We desperately needed the moisture, because for the last couple of weeks we were in the 70s and even 80s, when we should have been in the 50s. 

All the horses in the photo have their heads down because Alayne had just fed them their dinner.

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(Click on photos for larger image.)