The causes remain mysterious. For seemingly no reason, Zoe will stare at Annie and launch into red alert. She's scared; ears flat, back arched, hellish feral crying. We have no idea what scares her, because most of the time, the cats interact as normal. Annie is just as astonished as we are. When Zoe goes into her routine, Annie just stares, shell shocked. If we don't intercede, that's when the whole operation steps up to Rush's seminal album "Moving Pictures." Because Annie will then go into her own defensive mode... and two cats in defense mode inevitably reduces down to two cats in attack mode.

Last Sunday morning, we had probably the biggest incident to date in terms of post-scuffle cleanup. It's around 6am, and I hear the unholy screaming. Instantly I'm out of bed; both cats are at the bottom of the stairs. It's dark and I don't have my glasses on, so the picture is fuzzy. They're not fighting, just yelling... so I stick my hand between them, and I feel a warm mist. Zoe is hissing, so I initially think it's some ferocious spitting. It's not.

Rhonda is right behind me, scoops up a trembling angry Zoe, and announces that she is wet. Somebody sprayed. Rhonda takes Zoe up to the tub for a bath (of which Zoe was actually very appreciative) and I inspect the area. Judging from Rhonda's report, whoever did it, most of it ended up on Zoe. There's some small little puddles on the floor, a lot of collateral damage to our pile of shoes. Suspiciously, none on Annie.

Although I'm not convinced Annie is the guilty party. It's extremely rare for a spayed female cat to spray like that... it's conceivable that Zoe did the deed and then sat in it herself because Annie had her cornered and I was barrelling down the steps. Either one of them could have sprayed, a natural reaction to the stress of the situation.

So we're back to locking Zoe in the back bedroom while we're away, because this kind of thing just can't happen when we're not around to play Benvolio. We're awfully lucky that they chose the bottom of the stairs as their battleground, because it's an area entirely devoid of carpet, comic books, electronics and other items that would be better served without a dousing of cat piss.

Since then, we've had a couple other near misses... Zoe goes into alert for no reason, then I pick her up and get her away from Annie. She calms down quickly enough, but it's such a mystery why it happens in the first place.

Zoe is getting spayed at the end of the month. It's entirely possible that her burgeoning sexuality is the culprit, and being fixed will smooth her out. We're hoping.