This might take a few more episodes…Swansea, family farm, me.oh..10 or so..four of us kids, me the oldest..here we were ratting around in the hay barn..well, perhaps mousing a better description! lift a bale of hay up, and chase the resulting meeces everywhere…so this day, we saw .oh, maybe 3 or 4 kittens. No mother kitty with them, so we knew what had happened. Every so often we had someone throwing a bag into the river..or they’d throw the cats out and drive off..I managed to catch one. Beautiful kitten..grey, long fur, black paws and ears. And you could see a faint outline of a tabby cat stripes. Mum reckoned that the mother had gotten pregnant by a tabby tom, and..the kittens were thrown out. She got fed up, regained some weight..and started popping out kittens like they were going out of fashion. But..a few days after I had caught her, I was going down the riverbank, fishing rod in one hand, bait and kitten in the other. Something caught my attention..I stopped, and turned around, looked down. Gee, here was an identical kitten, doing its best to keep up with me..poor little thing. 1/2 starved..took it back home, fed it up..but it didn’t work. Then I saw maggots..where maggots arent supposed to be..and had a pretty fair idea that there wasn’t much I could do. It woke up, gave me a purr..and that was that. Gee. I have to say here, that being brought up on a farm..and in those days as well, death is something that happened here and there. Sheep died..Dad had a mob of killers that got bumped off fairly regularily..we had a pig for a while..came back from Hobart once, and ..no more pig! But we had some chops that weren’t sheep..and two crochety sisters! I’m not eating Emmalisa! sort of thing. Dad said the worse thing that happened was..that the pig got a name..