They arrived to housesit amid 2 dogs and 16 cats. What could go wrong?
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We liked the dogs. We liked them even after the terror they inflicted. But we still fled. Let me back up: My girlfriend and I have housesat for one to two months at a time for many years, all over the world. Many stints involved caring for pets, which haven’t always matched their owners’ descriptions. Yet most of those pets and their needs ultimately were manageable.
Not at our most recent sit, which courted madness.
The place: a beautiful home in Portugal’s Algarve region. The people: amiable Europeans who were shopping for a new property in France. The pets, at least as advertised: a friendly pug, Bessie, and a friendly corgi, Blossom, plus a “few” feral cats, one pregnant, that were being fed regularly in a raised garden area on a back patio.
The reality we confronted: two frenetic canines and 16 felines, including, after a surprise relocation by another mom, eight kittens.
Early on, we got a sharp sense of what was ahead when one of the cats came through the patio dog door and Bessie and Blossom gave chase, all three leaping and thrashing against cabinets and shelves, the cat suffering a butt bite before it managed to escape back outdoors. We immediately blocked the door opening, but the dogs could still circle around the house to raise hell.
Inside or out, the corgi barked incessantly. And the travel gods decreed that her barking was the perfect pistol shot into my ears to trigger my tinnitus. The gods soon upped the ante, having convinced the homeowners to schedule a team of gardeners to undertake a complex irrigation/turfing project in the backyard during our sit, five days a week for long hours every day.
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Blossom raged at every sighting of the workers, explosive blasts that made my ears ring like I was in a boxing match. No matter what I did or how much I pleaded, she wouldn’t let up. Think Cerberus, the hound of hell, but with its three heads barking at once.
Amid all this tumult, we suddenly were asked to manage the distribution of the litters to various acquaintances of the homeowners, the majority of whom spoke little English. The first hopefuls were a father, mother and daughter, who conveyed that they wanted a shy calico kitten, one we’d never been able to get near. The man climbed up onto the raised garden ledge and tried unsuccessfully to grab the kitten as mama cats and offspring retreated to the bushes above. The family left empty-handed but managed to upset both the cats and the dogs in the process.
The next morning, one of the stressed mothers, having decided she’d had enough, began moving her babies. The pug intercepted, catching a kitten by its head and whipping through the yard with the blue-eyed tabby writhing, limbs outstretched, while the other dog watched in avid fascination. I tried to rescue the victim by prying it out of Bessie’s jaws; only the day before the tiny creature had been sniffing, pawing and licking my hand. Now I watched it succumb with a gasp on the ground.
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The slaying was a turning point. Until then, Bessie had been the calm one. When Blossom had challenged her to also heckle the gardeners, she’d responded with a lot of vigorous but muffled chuffing and snorting — a combo that sounded like she was ingloriously ridding herself of a hairball. Now she was a kitten killer with ramped-up bloodlust. Despite the cats hiding in the thick bushes, she ran madly about under their patio ledge for hours.
That endless barking, the awful death, our confusion over the cats’ welfare — we implored the heavens to intercede, but the message was lost in transit. So we asked the homeowners to return early because it was all too much. They were as gracious when we departed as when we’d arrived nearly two weeks earlier, but I have dark thoughts about what happened while we were there.
The way that kitten’s life ended, well, it has stayed with us.
We left southern Portugal to travel dazedly around the country, first to coastal Faro, to stay in a hostel as the token elders, enjoying the town’s lively restaurants, its ancient walled inner city, its startling giant storks’ nests atop centuries-old buildings. But we were still thinking about the kitten.
Then on to intriguing and cheerful Cascais, where we ended up in our bleary-eyed efforts to secure lodging in Lisbon, not realizing until later that we’d instead booked accommodations 40 miles away. Though getting into the 10th-floor apartment was a morass of errors, wrong codes, odd elevators and clumsy keys, the place was big, with equally big ocean views. But we were still thinking about the kitten.
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Even in our final stop of Lisbon, despite the most exquisite chocolate cake in the world, the wonderful winding streets and the sparkle from the sea, we were still thinking about the kitten.
So much is good in Portugal, especially when sampled with the vinho verde. A bow and a wave to the exceedingly friendly Portuguese people, who helped us with plane, train and automobile. (We needed the help: We mangled most every transit arrangement.)
As we returned a week ahead of schedule, paying the dizzying expense of new tickets to take the place of our nonrefundable ones, we vowed no more dogs at housesits. Yet did our minds change about the best way for us to see this beautiful wide world? We’d already learned to recognize some red flags in a setup — such as an “easy care” mention, often code for laundry, billing and management duties of what is actually an Airbnb — and to flex with the surprises. At times they’re good ones. At times the animals are a delight. And there’s immense satisfaction in being able to get more into a community’s culture. A hotel room is just a glance, not a connection.
For our next sit, however, we’ve narrowed the range of creatures we’re considering: hamsters.
Tom Bentley is a California-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter: @TomBentleyNow
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Source: The Washington Post
