Shortly after Truff moved in, he developed an alarming limp in one front leg; he wasn’t putting weight on it at all. Fearing the worst, I finally got him to let me examine the limb. It turned out nothing was broken or dislocated, but he had a nasty scrape in the middle of his paw pad, just where he’d be putting his weight if he tried to step on it. Now, I’ll never be able to prove this, but I will always suspect that he was acting uppity with the rats, and Miranda let him have it.
Truff is a gorgeous cat—he’s a random-bred Snowshoe, one of the Siamese derivatives—and very loving. But he’s, well, not very bright. He doesn’t need to be.
How did a fifteen-pound tomcat end up with a foo-foo name like Truffles? When he first showed up in the neighborhood, before his Trip To The Vet, his unofficial temporary name was “Chocolate Balls.” (Meanwhile, the hamster Puddles got her name because when I first had her, she was very anxious about being picked up, and...)