This weekend we found Smoke, one of our barn cats who lives in Lena’s Barn, limping on a front leg and acting like he hurt. I gathered him up and took him to the cat house. Typically our barn cats do not … repeat do not … like being confined, but Smoke didn’t protest when I put him in a medical cage for 24 hours of cage rest and gave him a painkiller. The leg wasn’t really swollen and didn’t appear to be broken … more like a sprain, I thought. But this morning he still didn’t want to use it, so I put him in the truck and headed to our vet clinic in Helena. Alayne took the photo of Smoke and me just before we left.
It’s hard to tell from this photo, but Smoke has dazzling blue eyes and a beautiful Siamese-like coat. He is, in a phrase, drop-dead handsome. But he’s the first to tell you, "I’m not a Siamese, I’m a Montanan!"
When I got to the clinic after the 70-mile drive and let him out of the crate, he marched across the floor with no limp at all. And bearing weight on that leg, too. "Well, of course!," I thought to myself. Sometimes it seems all you have to do is haul an animal to the vet clinic and — it’s a miracle! — they’ll be fine when you arrive. I call this their "show-me-you-still-love-me" test .. they just want to know if we still care enough to make the effort to drive all that way. "Oh, I’m fine, thanks, just wanted to double-check. You passed."
But I could just see bringing the little devil all the way back to the ranch, letting him out of the crate, and then watching him limp away back to the barn. So I left him at the clinic for one of the doctors to examine.
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I had planned to pick up Popeye today — the operation to remove his eye had gone well last week — but over the weekend he had developed discharges from the surgery site and the sutured eyelids had started to come open. So our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, was trying to determine what had happened and obviously wanted him to remain at the clinic while she treated him for this new problem.
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In the background of the photo is Widget’s House, our main dog building, with all the snow on the roof. The trees are all frosty because we had an ice fog overnight and it coated everything in beautiful white crystals. It was one below zero this morning when I headed out to do barn chores, but fortunately the fog had lifted. It’s one above zero this evening, as I write this at 8:30 p.m. In case you’re wondering how our barn cats do in this kind of weather, Smoke and his two sisters, Smudge and Skitter, have a heated dog igloo in Lena’s Barn and a heated water bowl. At Beauty’s Barn, the two cats there — Joshua and Rocky — live in the medical room, which is heated to 60 degrees. It’s not exactly your typical barn cat life!
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