Happy Birthday, Libby Belle!

T'was nearly a half-score years astern that Captain Jack heard a commotion out in back of our hideout here at Feral Cove, one fine summer's morn.  Cato, a homeless canine of the chow-chow persuasion who we'd hired on as a sentry, had cornered something in the compost heap.  Could it be a crocodile? Or perhaps a soldier of fortune, come to collect Captain Jack's head for the bounty upon it?  (Captain Jack is a pirate after all... he must have a bounty on his head, right?  Right?)  With flintlocks loaded and drawn, your captain warily approached the compost heap, and found...

...a tiny blue-eyed white kitten no bigger than a BK Veggie.  Said kitten was valiantly hissing, spitting, and slashing at Cato, who was a hundred times her size and frothing at the mouth in an hysterical rage (as your average chow-chow sentries are wont to do.)  Warding off the over-enthusiastic Cato with one hand, your captain scooped up the stout-hearted little feline with the other and made his way back to the ramshackle shanty that he and Mad Bess call home, taking care to hold the lilliputian castaway up and out of the leaping chow-chow's reach.

Since this day happened to be the 4th of July, Bess and I decided to call the little one Liberty Belle, or Libby for short.  We fed her KMR from a baby bottle (which she adorably referred to as her "bok-bok") and she grew up to be big and strong (i.e., fat) and a total princess besides!  To this day we have no clue how a four-week-old kitten made her way over a six-foot privacy fence and successfully held off a rampaging 55-pound sentry dog for however many minutes it took for me to reach her... we have to just assume she was an angel who fell from Heaven... and landed in our compost heap.

Why am I telling you all this, me hearties?  Because this Wednesday past was Libby's tenth birthday.  She's not white anymore; as the years pass, her flame-point Siamese colours become more and more evident, but she's every bit the blue-eyed princess she always was!