Toltec was a dear little feline, lived 17 years at the museum before dying of old age. She was one of the kittens in two successive litters of four her little black longhair mother, "Mamacita," had dropped at the museum, before Bob could get her reproductive machinery turned off, and when we were desperately trying to come up with 8 cat names, I named this one "Toltec" because she was as black as the inside of Toltec Tunnel on the narrow gauge. Later she lost part of her tail in some long-forgotten accident, and some of the museum employees rather unkindly called her "Stubby" instead.
Once Bob Richardson, in the 1980s, was down to three cats, Mamacita, Toltec, and Spooky, a gray and white brother of Toltec, and one day while I was visiting from California he was feeding all three on the picnic table west of Locomotive 583. "Separate but equal," he would say, "Separate but equal," as he put food in three different cat dishes. Mamacita, especially, would swat her offspring if they got too close to her food.
One day I noticed Toltec was not eating, which I thought a bit strange, but then dismissed the idea and turned to walk around 583 to the side door of the Colorado Railroad Museum. Toltec ran between my legs and nearly tripped me, which was not characteristic, and for which I scolded him. I resumed walking, and he did it again. THEN, I noticed he was drooling all around his mouth. I called Bob over and said, "There's something wrong with Toltec," and we picked him up and put him on the pilot deck of No. 583 and I pried open his mouth. Embedded in the middle of his tongue was a big, nasty, spiky sandbur he had gotten out of his fur while washing himself. He couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he couldn't meow, but that smart little animal knew that if he could only get our attention, we could help him, so he ran between my legs twice, nearly tripping me, to get my attention. We took him inside, Bob got out some tweezers, we extracted the sandbur, and he was fine. I always thought felines were pretty smart little critters, but ever since that incident with Toltec I've been doubly impressed with the intelligence in those little almond-size feline brains.
Toltec was Bob's last cat, after all the others were gone, and when he left Golden to retire to Pennsylvania in 1991, he didn't want to uproot Toltec from his home, so left him at the Museum, whose staff cared for him well until the little cat died of old age some years later.
