Those who have been content to regard the cat merely,
aesthetically, as a household ornament, economically, as a
mouse-killer, or fantastically, as an adjunct of witchcraft, will
doubtless read this book with some surprise. For Svend Fleuron has
imagined (or observed) a cat more or less cut off from relationship
with men, bringing up her kittens in the fields, against all the odds
that any wild animal, surrounded by the destructive terrors of nature,
has to face. If this novel were a true picture of human life, it would
show, relentlessly and bitterly, how nature overcame the mother and
her children. As, however, it is a picture of cat life, the end is a
happy one...
| Title | Kittens: A Family Chronicle |
| Author | Svend Fleuron |
| Publisher | New York: Alfred A. Knopf |
| Year | 1922 |
| Copyright | 1920 Svend Fleuron, 1922 Alfred A. Knopf |
| Translated by | David Pritchard (from Danish) |
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
GRIM: The Story of a Pike
Illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop
"WILL surely become an animal classic
in the same class as Black Beauty, the
Jungle Books and the stones of Ernest Thompson
Seton." —The Baltimore Sun.
"Grim is delightful."
— New York Globe.
$2.00 net at all bookshops
NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF
Kittens : A Family Chronicle
Translated from the Danish of
Svend Fleuron
by David Pritchard
Foreword by Carl Van Vechten
New York Mcmxxii
Alfred • A • Knopf
COPYRIGHT. 1920, BY SVEND FLEURON
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
Published, January, 1922
Original Title: Killingerne : en Familiekrenike
Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y. Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"The other farm cats' kittens were born in barn and loft and were drowned litter after litter—but she would see that her kittens grew to be cats!"
Foreword- Those who have been content to regard the cat merely, aesthetically, as a household ornament, economically, as a mouse-killer, or fantastically, as an adjunct of witchcraft, will doubtless read ...
- Chapter One: Grey Puss
- THE May moon is still shining white and round in the sky; but eastward beyond the hills, silhouetting a farmhouse roof, the first faint light of dawn tinges the distant horizon. . . . Along a ...
- The Willow Stumps
- At the farthest end of the hedge loom three ancient willow stumps, like monster mushrooms springing from the ground. For more than a century they have been regularly clipped, a process ...
- The Kittens
- A shadowy bundle at the bottom of the bole comes to life: human eyes would have taken it for a number of mouldering sausages lying among moss and touchwood. The she-cat cautiously ...
- Grey Puss And Her Past
- She had been the children's kitten; had been petted and played with and had free run of the living-rooms. She could never forget those wonderful daysand the room there just the ...
- Chapter Two: The Blind See
- On the whole, the babies had grown. True, their coats were not quite in order, for the fur still stuck out patchily all over their bodies; but the hair was there right enough, and the colours ...
- The Father
- One afternoon very early in spring a small, snow-white he-cat came strolling carelessly along the road. His ears were thrust forward, betraying his interest in something ahead: he meant to take ...
- The Piebald Devil
- Had she reason to doubt him? He was chock-full of lust and vice, and great in merit as in fault; neverthelesshad she actual proof for doubting him? One night her eyes were ...
- The Rescue Of Tiny
- Grey Puss' milk tasted sour for a whole day following the adventure; she was frightfully restless and upset Several of the young ones had wounds and had to be licked. Time after time she ran ...
- The Flight From The Willow
- Truly that morning the kittens had trembled in the shadow of death! And Grey Puss always regarded the he-cat as the first betrayer, the cause of all her subsequent sorrows and ...
- Chapter Three: The Burial-Mound
- SHE came to a mound which rose, peaceful and untrodden, in the middle of the field. On every side of it corn was growing, but the mound itself was green with grass and smothered in wild flowers: ...
- Life In The Burial-Mound
- The fugitive little mother-cat had brought her kittens under cover just in time. That night a storm broke loose and thunder crashed incessantly, accompanying heavy showers of rain. Warm, heavy ...
- The First Mouse
- Several weeks pass happily. . . . The corn round the burial-mound ripens, and all sorts of grasses compete to lengthen its luxuriant green covering. The stones on the top become more and more ...
- The Thief
- One day about noon she is skirmishing in the neighbourhood of the farm. She lies hidden in the grass, her head in the air, keeping sharp look out for booty. In each of the pancake-...
- Drown The Brute
- Chicken after chicken kept vanishing from the farmyard . . . mysteriously . . . without trace. The farmer's precious racing-pigeons also disappeared, stolen, one by one, in broad ...
- A Great Reception
- Grey Puss went straight home to her kittens, and that by the main road. No sneaking along the ditches or crawling through the furrows, as so often before when dragging her spoil. No, ...
- Chapter Four: The Trickster
- ON the top of the mound the kittens are playing, in and out among the old tombstones. The sun has risen. It shines in long, golden stripes on the stones and lights up the deep, gloomy ...
- The Lid Of The Well
- As soon as the after-dinner siesta was at an end, Grey Puss, contrary to custom, called her kittens together with soft, alluring miauws, and took them for the first time along the secret, ...
- The Dragon-Fly
- A red-gold beam of light came from heaven, poured over the landscape through a mighty window in the clouds, and tinged with mauve the heavy well-lid's brittle edges. It lit up Grey Puss' colours ...
- The Old Crow
- Thus continued week after week the happy family life on the mound. Still no sign of any danger from without. The corn is now so tall that no human would think of tramping ...
- Chapter Five: Big-Kitten
- THICK-SET and sturdy, with short tail, strong legs, and a back which merged smoothly into a plump, round stomach; big, attentive eyes with intelligence and intensity in their glance; small ears ...
- Black-Kitten
- This was a fellow to be handled carefully! He returned snarl and spit for a kind word and he never hit softly on the nose, but scratched so that it hurt. He did not understand ...
- Miauw-Miauw—Miauw-Miauw
- Black made one of his first expeditions at the time when the wheat was just high enough to hide him. He sauntered defiantly through it, caring not a jot whether the ground beneath were wet or ...
- Grey-Kitten
- Such a short-legged little cat was surely never seen before! She seemed rather to crawl and glide over the ground than to walk. She had inherited her mother's disproportionately large hare-like ...
- Chapter Six: White-Kitten
- WHEN the wind brought word of human beings on the field-path, the kittens always stopped their play. Grey Puss had warned them in their earliest days to beware of people, and as a rule ...
- Tiny
- Tiny was, neither in appearance nor reality, a Hercules, being thin and stunted, with a large head and big, intelligent eyes. For the most part he lay still and slept. He had an ...
- Red-Kitten
- Whatever doubt there may have been as to Tiny's being a sly puss, it was quite certain that Red-kitten was a deceitful hussy! Her coat alone stamped her as a mountebank, being fox-red ...
- The Great Eating-House
- During the long, still evenings sounds could always be heard far away in the huge stone-heap where most of the tracks found by Red sooner or later ended. Often she approached ...
- Chapter Seven: Box
- BOX was a mixture of every possible race of dog. His head was pointed, but his ears, nevertheless, long and drooping, resembling those of a Gordon setter. His short, thick, bulldog ...
- Cats Of All Colours
- Among the wheat, which is now almost ripe, flame the poppy-torches . . . the blue-stalked corn is so thickly massed that Grey Puss disappears completely in its depths. The seething of ...
- The Life-Saving Chair
- In the evening, when the men were returning from their work, they heard a miserable howling and splashing from the old manure-well in the field. They stopped and listened; they seemed to know ...
- The Crow Again
- The kittens are now compelled more and more to find their own food; and in consequence are often reduced to a very meagre diet. Maybugs, grasshoppers, and snails float about inside each of them!<...
- Chapter Eight: The Kittens Go Out Hunting
- GREY PUSS had not been home for two whole days and nights. And the unaided efforts of the kittens to secure food had not resulted in anything more satisfying than the usual maybugs and ...
- The Attack On The Crow'S Nest
- Black, shadowed by Terror, walks straight towards the village copse; a little wilderness of elms and ashes, with a thick undergrowth of nettles, meadow-sweet, and buttercups. A ...
- Chapter Nine: The Canary
- ROUND the outskirts of the farm the wallflowers crowd in full bloom, flaming and glowing in the nearly risen sun. A little fox-coloured cat curls in and out among the flowers, sniffing ...
- Box And The Red Communist
- Red became more and more recklessand the wretched Box, who often saw her from his kennel, suffered the agonies of Tantalus! His defeat in the manure-well had not reformed the cat-...
- The Smoke-Dog
- The nihilist was really beginning to reform. What the farmer's wife failed to achieve with her dog lessons, Grey Puss succeeded in doing with her needle-like claws. But Box had his ...
- Chapter Ten: The Best Cat
- BIG-CAT knew the neighbourhood thoroughly for a distance of at least two miles in every direction. Along fence and ditch, which were his hunting-paths, he crept in search of his prey. ....
- The Hanger-On
- Black is a fighter: brave, daring, sometimes foolhardy; but Terror is, and always will be, a hanger-on. When all danger is past, and the owl has flown away, he sneaks ...
- Grey On The Warpath
- Over hill and dale as far as the eye can reach stretch line after line of stacked-up corn-sheaves. The golden oats and the light-yellow barley and wheat, have fallen asleep at lastheavy ...
- The Thief-Cat
- While the others sneaked round in copse and cornfield, following their crooked, winding hunting-paths, Red-kitten usually made a bee-line to the nearest house or farm. Sometimes, at rare ...
- White-Kitten And The Calf
- In the neighbourhood of the pool also, where the red baby-calf was tethered, autumn began to wave its withered hand. The great burdock plants were dying of consumption; their huge flat leaves ...
- Chapter Eleven: The Kittens Hunt By Night
- THE September moon rises red-gold and majestic from the mists of the horizon, and lights up the harvested fields where the five big kittens are stalking their prey. They no longer hunt in a body,...
- The Death Of Box
- Grey Puss becomes lazier and lazier, and no longer takes the slightest interest in her offsprings' food difficulties. Whereas formerly she used often to go hungry herself in order to feed her ...
- Home-Sickness
- Now that Box was dead Grey Puss had only mankind to fear! She hated mankind, which surpassed even her in cunning and rapacityand yet, she could never forget that she had once ...
- Chapter Twelve: The Demon Mouser
- THE crofter lived down by the marsh, where he owned some fields with blackish-brown soil, which he was ploughing for the autumn sowing. . . . The ploughing progressed spasmodically; ...
- Exit Red
- Sulphur-yellow, gall-green shafts mingle with the scarlet of the sunrise, and slowly wrest a large quadrangular farmhouse from the cloudy October dawn's foul wet mists. Outside the cow-...
- Big-Kitten Turns Wild Cat
- One autumn evening, as huge, billowy clouds are drifting across the orange-gold western sky, Big-cat wakes in his lair and feels the call to action. The noise of day has died from the fields, ...
- The Home Of The Fisherman
- After leaving the village the main road rose over the brow of the hill and ran down again between rich, fertile fields until it crossed the river which hugged the valley. At the bottom ...
- Black Joins The Army
- At last Madness has succeeded in coming to grips with the young fox. . . . They do battle on a grassy field, bounded on one side by yellow straw and on the other by dried-...
- Chapter Thirteen: Grey Puss' Future
- THE late autumn showers were beginning. . . . Heavy, violet-blue clouds swollen with moisture drifted about and often two rainbows stood simultaneously one behind the other in the sky....
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