Other than Mother Cat I had no interaction with the adults, who acted as if I did not exist. I tangled with the kittens, wrestling and climbing and chasing all day. Sometimes I would growl at them, irritated with their style of play, which just seemed wrong, somehow. I wanted to climb on their backs and chew on their necks, but they couldn’t seem to get the hang of this, going limp when I knocked them over or jumped on top of their tiny frames. Sometimes they wrapped their entire bodies around my snout, or batted at my face with teeny, sharp claws, pouncing on me from all angles.
At night I missed my siblings. I missed my mother. I had made a family, but I understood that the cats were different from me. I had a pack, but it was a pack of kitties, which did not seem right. I felt restless and unhappy and at times I would whimper out my anguish and Mother Cat would lick me and I would feel somewhat better, but things were just not the way they should have been.
Nearly every day, the man came and brought food. Mother Cat punished me with a swift slap on my nose when I tried to approach him, and I learned the rules of the den: we were not to be seen by humans. None of the other felines seemed at all inclined to feel the touch of a person, but for me a growing desire to be held by him made it increasingly difficult to obey the laws of the den.
When Mother Cat stopped nursing us, we had to adjust to eating the meals the man supplied, which consisted of tasty, dried morsels and then sometimes exotic, wet flesh. Once I grew accustomed to the change it was far better for me—I had been so hungry for so long it seemed a natural condition, but now I could eat my fill and lap up as much water as I could hold. I consumed more than my sibling kitties combined, and was now noticeably larger than any of them, though they all were unimpressed by my size and resolutely refused to play properly, continuing to mostly claw at my nose.
We mimicked Mother Cat and shied away from the hole when the human presence filled it, but otherwise dared to flirt with the very edge, drinking in the rich aromas from outside. Mother Cat sometimes went out at night, and I could sense that the kittens all wanted to join her. For me, it was more the daylight that lured, but I was mindful of Mother Cat and knew she would swiftly punish any attempt to stray beyond the boundary.
One day the man, whose fragrances were as familiar to me now as Mother Cat’s, appeared just outside the hole, making sounds. I could sense other humans with him.
“They’re usually way toward the back. The mother comes closer when I bring food, but she won’t let me touch her.”
“Is there another way out of the crawl space besides this window?” It was a different voice, accompanied by different smells—a woman. I unconsciously wagged my tail.
“I don’t think so. How will this work?”
“We’ve got these big gloves to protect us, and if you’ll stay here with the net, you can catch any cats that make it past us. How many are there?”
“I don’t know, now. Until recently the female was obviously nursing, but if there are any kittens they don’t come out in the day. A couple others, I don’t know what sex. There used to be so many, but I guess the developer must have gotten them. He’s going to tear down this whole row of houses and put up an apartment complex.”
“He’ll never get a demolition permit with feral cats living here.”
“That’s probably why he did it. Do you think he hurt the ones he caught?”
“Um, okay, so, there’s no law against trapping and destroying cats living on your own property. I mean, he could have taken them to one of the other shelters, I guess.”
“There were a lot of them. The whole property was crawling with cats.”
“Thing is, I didn’t hear anything about a big bunch of cats showing up anywhere. Animal rescue is a pretty tight community; we all talk to each other. If twenty cats hit the system, I would have heard about it. You okay? Hey, sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m fine. I just wish I had known it was going to happen.”
“You did the right thing by calling us, though, Lucas. We’ll find good homes for any cats we find. Ready?”
I had grown completely bored with the monotonous noises and was busily wrestling with the kittens when I felt Mother Cat stiffen, alarm jolting through her. Her unwinking eyes were on the hole, and her tail twitched. Her ears were flat back against her head. I regarded her curiously, ignoring the little male kitty who ran up, swatted my mouth, and darted away.
Then a light blazed and I understood her fear. Mother Cat fled toward the back wall, abandoning her young. I saw her slip soundlessly into the hidden crack just as two humans came in through the hole. The kittens milled in confusion, the male cats fled to the back of the den, and I shied away, afraid.
The light danced along the walls, then found me, blazing brightly in my face.
“Hey! There’s a puppy in here!”
Two
“Hey kitty-kitty!” The woman crawled forward, reaching out. On her hands, thick cloth was redolent with traces of many different animals, mostly cats.
The kittens reacted by darting away in terror. Their flight was chaotic and without direction, and none of them ran to the crack in the wall where Mother Cat hid, though I could smell her in there, cowering and afraid. The other adult cats were little better, though they were mostly frozen, staring in dread at the approaching human. One of them broke for the hole and snarled when the woman caught him in her heavy mittens. She handed him carefully back to another pair of cloth-covered hands. Two more adults made it past her and out to freedom.
“Did you catch them?” the woman asked loudly.
“One of them!” came the answering shout. “The other one got away.”
As for me: I knew what I should do. I should go be with my mother. But something in me rebelled against this reaction—instead, I felt enticed by the woman wriggling toward me, fascinated by her. A compulsion seized me: though I had never experienced human touch, I had an acute sense of how it would feel, as if remembering something from long ago. The woman gestured toward me with her hands even as the rest of the adult cats bolted out the hole behind her. “Here, puppy!” I bounded forward, straight into her arms, my little tail wagging.
“Oh my God, you’re a cutie!”
“We caught two more!” shouted a voice from outside.
I licked the woman’s face, wiggling and squirming.
“Lucas! I’ve got the puppy, can you reach in and take him?” She lifted me up and examined my tummy. “Take her, I mean. She’s a girl.”
The man who had been bringing us food for the bowls appeared at the hole, his familiar smell flooding in. His hands reached out and gently wrapped themselves around me, and then he brought me out into the world. My heart was pounding, not in terror, but in total joy. I could still feel the kittens behind me, sense their fright, and Mother Cat was strong in the air, but right then I just wanted to be held by the man, to chew his fingers and pounce on him when he set me down and rolled me around in the cool dirt.
“You are so silly! You are such a silly puppy!”