I’ve told you about the kitties here before: every morning we feed Patches and the two cats that were her kittens last year, Afrit and Kiri. Patches is clearly taken care of by the guards, as she doesn’t mind getting picked up or petted and has a bit of a belly. She doesn’t stick around long after we feed her in the morning, preferring to see what she can force out of tourists in the temple. Afrit is pretty skittish and will only let me touch him if he’s eating (and even that spooks him a bit). He seems to understand we aren’t there to hurt him, but he still doesn’t trust us enough to do anything more than feed him.
Then there’s Kiri, the excavation favorite. She’s very tiny and comes early in the morning for breakfast. After breakfast, she usually hangs out with us for a while, playing in the pottery boxes or demanding to be petted. She leaves us for a bit, but has learned that we take a break to eat around 10 and has started joining us for that, too (since there’s always spare pita that we give her).
Kiri really seems to enjoy her post-breakfast playtime. Sometimes, she stalks Afrit; sometimes she plays with the gigantic ants that are all over site; sometimes she bats at our bags. And then there are the times she plays on the roofs of the little benches we work next to. The roofs are probably 8 feet off of the ground, yet she’s able to jump and climb up to them with ease. See?
Somehow, even though I’m on the other side of the world, my cats at home must have heard about Kiri and her love of high places. My cat Avery has decided that clearly, the only way to get Mommy back is to show her that Kiri is no better than they are. She, too, can get up to high places.
She doesn’t have claws to hoist herself up, so even though she’s jumping off of the back of the couch, she’s still jumping something like 3 feet in one bound. And she apparently does it with no running head start. At least my husband was able to take all of the knick-knacks off of the bookshelf before she broke anything!
- Cat Wrangler
PS. I kind of really love this picture:
