Ours begins in Diamond City, and no, we did not invent it. It sits in the short-grass country just north of Lethbridge, Alberta: a town that took its name from the diamonds it hauled out of the dark. Black ones. The miners’ kind. The kind that heated half a province. Where there is coal there are stores, where there are stores there are mice, and where there are mice, if a town is very lucky, there are cats equal to the assignment.
The cats of Diamond City did not ask for wages. They asked for a windowsill facing east and the dignity of an unbothered evening. In exchange, so the story goes, they kept the granaries spotless and the ledgers honest, and the merchants, who trusted nothing they could not bite, trusted them completely. A mouser of that country was said to hear a whisker’s worth of trouble through a foot of oak.
“You can dig a diamond out of the ground. The better ones walk up and sit on you.”
Whether every word survives the retelling, no one alive will swear. Stories are like that. But temperament survives. Manners survive. The white gloves survive. The four kittens on this page were raised under our roof in that same country: underfoot and unhurried, handled daily, spoken to constantly, introduced to the vacuum cleaner as an equal.
We call them Diamond Mousers. Spend a minute with the four of them below, and you will call them that too.
“Diamond Mouser” is the private designation of our house: a mark of upbringing, temperament and provenance, not a breed registry. The legend is told the way all good prairie stories are told. Diamond City, Alberta, however, is entirely real, and so are the kittens.
Plate I · Blaze, mid-arrival
