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When we call Tink the Übercat, it's more than just a joke.   By all appearances, she could easily be the prototype for the first American cat.   She's big, strong and healthy; she can move both swiftly and quietly; her coloring and markings would easily hide her from sight in almost any sort of terrain that provided more than a few sticks for cover.  Though she proved to us she had no earthly idea what to do with a mouse, I think if she'd grown up 'al fresco,' she likely would have made a good hunter.  She can certainly hear a bag rustle from the other end of the house, and seldom misses a trick playing, if she wants to play.

Though she's considerably less personable than little Ms. 'I'm so cute' and Mr. 'I must have my butt on you,' she has her moments from time to time.  They seldom involve inhabiting a lap, but then who really wants to watch two attention-craven thirteen pound cats vie for lap space?

Her favorite place, in fact, is the master bathroom.  She has expectations, you see.  The bathroom is Tink's place to solicit attention.  She will tolerate Squeek being in there, as long as Squeek hides behind the toilet or between the shower curtains and leaves her alone to prance about on the edge of the tub, purring like a Porsche, behaving like she behaves at no other time, in no other place.  She stands in the bathtub purring and sounds like some kind of mysterious mammalian dial tone.  If she doesn't get her time in the bathroom, she will snub you for the rest of the day.  But, then, sometimes she does that anyway ... except when she's hungry, when she just loves you to death, you big thumb-wielding human.

Tink is our Audrey Hepburn cat.  She always looks formal -- black gloves and boots, black eyeliner and lipstick, and of course the little black necklaces any properly striped tabby earns at birth.  Her ennui is palpable, most of the time.  We are never sufficiently exciting -- and yet she hates to go outside, hates to go in the car, hates attention except for a rare few minutes a day.  She takes trips to the vet clinic with stoicism, silence, an impeccably-behaved glare and a few switches of her tail.   She is not now, nor will she ever be, dignity impaired.  Even when she does something so stupid a dog would laugh, she manages to convey the traditional cat's 'I meant to do that' in a way that convinces you that you probably shouldn't laugh because she knows where you sleep, and she can balance a five-inch long turd upright on a postage stamp, if she's feeling especially inspired.

She is the kind of cat who makes people who hate cats -- especially men who hate cats -- feel justified.  She snubs the best efforts anyone can make toward 'buddying up' if she just doesn't feel the need to be your buddy.  She has been known to swat or bite without warning, when subjected to unwanted attention.  She wants attention on her terms, in certain places in the house, under certain circumstances and wants, the rest of the time, simply to be left alone.

At the same time, she certainly gives little indication that she is unhappy.  She only poops on the floor when we've done her a grave injustice -- gone away for a few days, changed to a litter she doesn't like, forced her to abide other humans than her own.   Pooping on the floor is, in fact, her only real protest.  She scratches only the carpet, the scratch furniture and, on occasion, Gord -- and even this usually requires Gord to be aggressive or annoying for some period of time before she will actually flip out the claws and dig a divot out of him.  Though she will occasionally play 'whack-a-Doodle,' it's usually a clawless whack delivered during a speed strafing run through the house, and as often as not, Doodle initiates the strafing runs.  She knows what she's getting herself into, in other words, and has nobody to blame but herself.  Tink's never been a sausage different.

Often, when you read the web pages of people who have multiple cats, you'll read long laments about what a pain it is to share the bed with them.  You see, in some people's houses, there will be more than one cat on the bed at a time.  In our house, Tink 'ownxors' the bed and smacks anybody else silly who tries to camp there at night.  Squeek has, of late, taken to hopping up with us when we first crawl in, cuddling up to Tony's belly or the valley the comforter makes between us, but even she knows -- if she's still there when Tink makes her grand entrance, Squeek quietly makes her way to the floor and disappears.  Tink also has the cats on a regimen with the litter boxes -- we have two upstairs and two down -- where they only poop in one box.  It isn't, apparently, universally observed, but it's observed frequently enough that it makes me laugh when I scoop the boxes.  She started that when we brought Gord home, and put a second box downstairs, in the bathroom off the family room where the cats like to hang.  It must be done her way.

She has had an on-again off-again infatuation with a set of book shelves that currently resides upstairs, in our front room.  When she was a wee thing, she used to climb up and snuggle back on the lower shelves.  That was when she weighed seven pounds, though -- even if she could fling herself up there now, and the shelves weren't all full of books and tchotchke, she'd have quite the labor curling up without some significant portion of her anatomy hanging over.  Still, sometimes after dinner in the evenings, she'll stand before the book case, her sleek black tail curled into a question mark, and serenade it with her melodic contralto.  We think she may want to eat a dried carnation that she found there once, years ago, of which she was deprived before she could finish.  She could not possibly know it's still there (it is), but some cats have long memories.  Tink, apparently, is one such cat.

Tink cannot abide a closed door.  She has always hated them -- no closet or room is sacrosanct, in her estimation.  We used to have a terrible time with her, in the old apartment, because she always wanted to bolt into the laundry/furnace room under the stairs and hide behind the washer and dryer, in the dark, dust- and cobweb-filled cranny.  It happened a few times, if she timed it correctly and bolted just when one of us was carrying out a basket of laundry.  She didn't like for the sliding closet doors in the spare bedroom to be closed; she would scratch and wheedle and coax until she got them open, even though the closet was so crammed with boxes and clothing there really was nowhere for her to go once she got there.  Occasionally, she'll strongpaw the sliding wooden doors on our bedroom closet open.   Sometimes she doesn't even bother to enter the closet, once she's opened the doors -- she just can't abide the thought that they're closed.

She has, for several years now, been  fascinated with the door to the spare bedroom (our collection of boxes full of papers and clothes has only multiplied, since the apartment) and the door, halfway up the wall, for the crawlspace above the front room and dining room.  We don't know what she thinks is there.  Food?  Bugs?  Valhalla?  The old apartment?  Her mother?  Aliens?

Only Tink knows for sure, and she's not telling.