Minnie asked me once what it meant when her young kitten Ariana bit her. Silly me, I told her it meant that the cat loved her because whenever my black cat bites me, it’s a gentle love bite on the calf, sometimes right before she licks me nearly to death. I’d completely forgotten what it was like to have a kitten who really grabbed onto your arm with its front paws, attacked your wrist with its teeth, and kicked you away with its back legs, all at the same time.

You should see the markings H.E. has on both his arms. A stranger once asked him conversationally if he’d been gardening rose bushes, but what looks like thorn scratches are actually the scars of dealing with Sox. Fortunately, mine aren’t half as bad and are barely visible because Sox is much gentler with his mother than he is with his father. It simply won’t do for him to beat up on Mommy because he’s raised to treat women right.

Pshaw. As if cats could possibly think that way.

Anyway, my assumption for such behavior has always been that it’s a learning kind of play that young cats do to hone their skills in the hunt, and I have sometimes joked before that it was also because they are teething.

OMG. Little did I know!

Yesterday, after watching me weed in the backyard and after chasing and feasting on some green moth-like bug I inadvertently brought in the house with me, Sox play attacked my arm as usual and left little red spots on my hoodie’s sleeve. I drew back and gazed at the spots in horror as I realized they were drops of blood — fear, when I realized that those drops of blood belonged to Sox. I pointed them out to H.E., and we proceeded to look into Sox’s mouth, which looked a little red.

“I don’t know. He seems fine,” we both commented to each other. We had him attack my other arm to see if the red spots would be repeated, and they were, but they were smaller and more faded, as if the bleeding had only just stopped.

I was frightened because I thought the bug he played with did him some harm, and I was worried because I had no idea how or where he could have hurt himself. We checked his mouth again because I thought I saw a line down one of his teeth, but we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Until I spotted a tiny little cat tooth on the bedspread.

I’d thought at first it was a little claw, but it wasn’t as curved, and it was smooth on all sides except at the root, where it was jagged and hollow, with the edges pinked in blood. We checked his mouth YET AGAIN, but all his teeth were there. Apparently, Sox had just lost a baby tooth. That was the conclusion I made, but I looked it up on the internet just to make sure, and yes, Google confirmed it; kittens, like kids, lose their baby teeth at a certain age. It appears his adult cat teeth finally grew in and pushed his baby teeth out.

I found another cat tooth a little bit later, same condition as the first. I kept both in a special place so I could put them in a see-through pouch and maybe scrapbook them later if I wanted to play weird cat lady someday and creep all the neighbors’ kids out. Or I could stick them under the cat bed for the cat tooth fairy in exchange for catnip.

It makes me wonder what happened to the kitten teeth that black Cat lost all those years ago. They were probably sucked up into a vacuum bag and taken to the dump, where the cat tooth fairy ended up covered in muck and dirt, smelling like rotting trash, looking for the darn things.

Poor cat tooth fairy! If only I had known, I might have left a note of apology and some cat whiskers as a consolation prize. Cat whiskers, after all, are the cat’s whiskers, and kitten teeth can hardly compare.

Share this post: