medicine. They held my mouth open and put the medicine down my throat with a spoon. I did not like it. I would not take any more. I went away in dark places. Sometimes I crawled into the house, and then they tried to make me eat. They could not make me eat. I grew weaker and weaker, and one day they said I was dead. The boy said, ‘That cat is not dead. That is one of the cats that will live all her nine lives.’

“I was not dead, or if I was dead I came to life again.

“When I came to life again two of my kittens were playing by my side. Only two. The others were gone. Very soon even these two were taken from me. Not one of them ever came back. Kittens that have been taken away do not come back.

“Now that I had no kittens to need me at home, I was free to go out and meet my friends on fences and the shed-roofs. I went often, and enjoyed my fights with them very much.

“One day when it was cold weather I went to a swamp to watch a rat’s nest. Another cat had been watching for that rat, but I meant to get it myself. I ran all the way, and when I got there I saw the rat on the tree holding on by his tail and eating what he could find, and I went up, but the rat slipped down the other side and went to his nest.

“I had better have kept away from that tree. By going up that tree I got shot. Two boys saw me, and one shot me. I dropped to the ground. The boys came and kicked me. I was almost dead. The shots stayed in me and they are in me now. I could crawl a little, but I was very weak.

“While I stayed there, crawling a little when I could, a cat came out from the swamp and ran at me. She was one of my own kittens grown up into a cat. She had been dropped in the woods, and she was a wild cat. She flew at me and she would have damaged me very much if a dog had not barked and scared her away. The dog did not touch me. He took me out of a muddy ditch. I was crawling, and did not know I was close to the muddy ditch, and fell into it and went deep in the mud and water. The dog jumped in and pulled me out. He carried me to a house and dropped me on the doorstep. The boy came from my house to see me. The people said I was dead. The boy said, ‘No, she will come to life. She is a cat that will live all her nine lives.’ And I did come to life. The boy carried me home, and the grandma woman washed me and fed me with milk, and put me in a good bed, and I was soon well enough to take a little squash with my milk.

“The grandma woman used to 

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