Page 8 - Animal Kin

like she was her own baby.
We built a huge cage in our dining room so that Loudey
would have lots of room to play when we weren’t home. The cage took up one whole corner of the room, from floor to ceil- ing. We put a tree in there and a small pool of water. For a little while Loudey was happy in there. But she was curious and her little hands were good at opening things and one day while we were away, she opened the latch and left the cage. I don’t know everything that she did while we were out but when we got home it was clear she had been in the re- frigerator. There were broken eggs on the floor and Victoria had a very guilty look on her face like maybe she had eaten some of them too.
At this point Loudey was the size of a cat. She loved to be in water and when we were taking our bath at night, she would run around the edge of the tub and splash the wa-
ter with her hands. Sometimes she would jump in too and play like a kid in a pool. Victoria would watch her and even though we were happy with this game, she seemed to disap- prove.
We lived in a row house and so our front porch was at- tached to all of our neighbor’s porches. When the weather