And so, the kittens are progressing. They have been on this planet for a full week now. I see small but real differences in their appearance and conduct. They are bigger than they were when they were born. Their tails stick out more. They do not stand up yet, but they use their legs in a way I cannot easily describe, but which propels them around my dirty laundry with greater elegance than they displayed earlier.

They have yet to open their eyes. Their mother is with them all the time; she has not been away from them for more than half an hour, when she goes outside to pee, or to show baby pictures to other mothers, or whatever she does out there. She usually lies down on her side, with her outstretched legs forming a kind of harbor embracing her kittens, who swim to her nipples in that motion I described earlier. They do not seem deliberately to push each other aside while they do so, or even to be aware of each other, but rather obliviously get in each other's way as they shove to the mother's nipples. She often sits in a crouching position, with her brood beneath her, their heads leaning back to suckle.

I frequently walk over to their box to read in the chair I placed there for that purpose, and I look at them. The mother smiles up at me blissfully. The kittens show neither pleasure nor interest when I touch them. The mother does not object to my touching her kittens, but she seems to prefer me to massage her body rather than their's. I see this, I think, because she stares at my hand when I touch the kittens, as cats do when they want to be massaged. She trusts me to touch them and to look at them, but I am only for her, and not for them. The mother is only for her kittens. She no longer jumps on my lap for her own pleasure as I sit at my desk.

Several times I ran over to the laundry-box to find out why I was hearing some exceptionally raucous squeals coming from their corner. It seems that the mother quite obliviously changes position within the box - she must move occasionally - from one side to the other, and she sits down right on top of one or two of her kittens. These kittens cry and squeal until I lift the mother's body up so that the poor kittens can crawl out from beneath her. The rescued kitten then looks for a nipple on her mother's back. Finding none, he or she migrates around to the mother's belly. I sometimes pick the kitten up and put her in the right place. The mother sits there smiling all this time, perfectly oblivious to the smashed kitten I rescued from her bulk. She probably outweighs each kitten by a factor of ten or fifteen.

While I was contemplating the cat's limitations as a mother, a friend came to visit me. With him was his enormous Rhodesian Ridgeback dog. This dog is a special breed of dog bred in what is now Zimbabwe. They are big, tough-looking dogs designed to fight lions in dog-packs.

As I stood at the door of my shack, I suggested that my friend not bring his dog through the door, because he might frighten my poor little cat, who has kittens. Before I could finish that sentence, the mother did not jump, but rather flew through the air, landing on this ferocious Rhodesian Ridgeback's face. She held on with all four sets of claws, simultaneously sinking her teeth into one of the dog's ears. The dog ran away howling, the cat clinging to his face as he ran. He managed to push her off his face with his paws - he was after all as much bigger than she as she than her kittens - but she jumped back onto his him a second time, now a little further back and higher on his head. It looked as if the dog were wearing a shtreimel. Her hind claws dug into the dog's nose, her forward claws being where his neck joined the back of his head. It was like that scene in "Jurassic Park" when the velociraptor jumps onto the tyrannosaurus rex and hangs on with his claws.

The ferocious Rhodesian Ridgeback began to cry, panic, and run away. The phrase "and ran off in every direction at once", which I read somewhere, came into my mind. The cat hopped off when she saw the dog run howling away, dripping a few drops of blood as he ran.

The cat then walked back into my shack and rejoined her kittens as if nothing had happened. She got back into the box, sat among my dirty sox, and purred sweetly at them. The only sign of agitation she displayed was that the hair on her tail stood up. It looked as if she had blown up her tail like a balloon. The kittens had slept blissfully through the whole adventure.

That night, the mother snuck into my bed and under the blanket as she had previously done before the kittens came. She wanted to be in bed with me again, but only for about half an hour. She had a catnap with me, but then she returned to her post with her family.