The Crossbreed

From the same author of Incident at Hawk’s Hill (a book loved as a kid and read many times over- surprised I haven’t written about that one yet!) Story of a wild cat, born from a domestic cat mating with a bobcat. Have to say right off the bat, there’s a lot of brutality, starting with a man trying to drown the mother housecat and her kittens- she narrowly avoids that fate and flees into the forest, where she later mates with the bobcat. The protagonist of the story, the crossbreed himself, is the sole survivor when the log his mother denned in gets swept down a river in a flood. He’s exhausted, half frozen and near starved when rescued by a kid who’s out fishing. The boy knows his father hates cats (especially wild ones) so he hides the kitten in a shed on their property. Raises the crossbreed, names it Yowler, and even successfully teaches it to hunt. Eventually the boy’s father discovers the cat and things go badly. The boy runs away with Yowler but they get separated, once again in bad weather on the river. Yowler is on his own in the wild, where he’d do okay really- there’s pages and pages describing his successful hunting forays- but he runs into trouble when is chased by hounds, caught by disreputable men who put him in staged fights with dogs, and after escaping, gets caught by a steel trap. This kind of puzzled me actually because there’s a picturing showing him missing two toes, before the incident with the trap happens in the story. I looked at that picture for a long time, trying to figure out if there was something in front of the cat’s foot, or what was wrong with it! Through his misadventures Yowler ends up far south of his normal territory, encountering animals he’s never seen before- armadillos, freshwater crocodiles, a wolf . . . Also has run-ins with lynx and bobcats- mates with several females but since he’s a hybrid himself, there are never any young. And in one improbable but very sweet encounter, he temporarily adopts an orphaned bobcat kitten. He travels north whenever he gets the chance, eventually finding his way back to his birthplace and even the site where the boy had raised him in the shed.

I liked this story, even if some parts of it were particularly gruesome (the fights with dogs in the ring) or a bit unlikely (adopting the wild kitten). I even jotted down a few questions I had to look up later: would a bobcat actually ever mate with a housecat in the first place? do male bobcats fight with the females as part of their courtship? do armadillos really eat enough mice they’re competition for prey with bobcats? Um, the answer to all is no. There’s been may reports of bobcats and domestic cats mating, but no proof that any were ever true accounts. Although on the other hand lynx and bobcats can breed, and their offspring are not sterile. While bobcats scream a lot at each other during mating encounters, they don’t roll into balls of clawing spitting fury causing each other injury like depicted in this story- they go from screaming, snarling and bluffing to playful behavior. As for the last, armadillos eat insects and small amphibians and reptiles, I couldn’t find anything about them regularly eating mice. All that said, this is just my quick internet research, not sure if the answers I came up with are accurate!

And I did enjoy the book regardless.