by Ardeana Hamlin
of The Weekly Staff
The last day of August, I glanced out the window and was surprised to see a starving cat in my driveway. There was no question in my mind that the cat hadn’t eaten in quite a while. She was rail thin, her fur was scruffy and she moved slowly, as if her supply of energy was about to run out. Immediately, my rescue instincts kicked in. I stepped quietly out to the porch, moving slowly, and spoke to the cat. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “You look pretty used up.”
To my surprise, instead of running in fear, the cat looked at me and meowed, a raspy, thin sound. Pitiful, in fact. Her ears pricked forward to the sound of my voice and she came up the walkway to the steps. I eased back into the kitchen, grabbed a bowl and a scoop of cat kibble I had fed to my other cat, the one that had left home several weeks before.
The new cat on my doorstep ate every scrap of food I gave her and she wanted more, which I gave her, which she ate. I brought a bowl of water. She drank and drank.
Whenever I opened the door, she peered inside, but was fearful of entering my house. I let her be.
When I was a child stray cats gravitated to my mother. She fed the stray cats, nursed their hurts and left them to their own devices. Once, a half-wild cat with an infected bite on its head crawled into her lap without any coaxing and allowed her to clean the wound with cotton balls dipped in warm water.
I knew from what I had learned from my mother that if the stray cat on my doorstep wanted to hang around my house, it would to be on her terms, not mine. My job was to give her food and water, and a place to curl up at night, until she decided she wanted to enlarge our acquaintance.
I discovered over the next few days that the cat had very specific ideas about what constituted a bed. One night, she slept on the porch, ignoring the polar fleece I had put in an apple crate. Another night, when the temperature dropped, when I thought sure she’d be happy to sleep in the box, she spent the night curled up on the pavement at the end of the walkway. Another night she spent in a stand of Japanese knotweed across the driveway. Each morning, I found her on the porch waiting for food.
When I attempted carefully to pat the cat’s head, she let me do it and purred. By the end of the first week, she allowed me to wrap her in a towel, with only her head exposed, so I could apply flea and tick repellent to relieve that misery.
My next adventure was to lure the cat into a carrier so I could take her to a veterinarian to have her general health evaluated.
Veterinarian Barbara Farren at Hampden Veterinary Clinic said the cat was healthy except for being thin, but adequate food would fix that. She had been spayed, had a broken canine tooth, was from 3 to 5 years old. But there was a glitch. There was no way to know the last time she had had a rabies shot. Farren told me that if the cat had been exposed to rabies, the symptoms might appear in a few days or as long as six months from now. She advised me to limit touching the cat and to watch for any changes in behavior. Which meant, that as cold weather approached, Miss Kitty, as I began to call her, might not be spending a lot of time in my house, except to eat, until February when the six months of watching would be over and she could have the shot.
Therefore, I was going to need a cat shelter more substantial that the two apple crates, stacked on their sides, that I had turned into a “kitty condominium.”
Meanwhile, I did all I could to try to find out where Miss Kitty belonged. I called the local animal control officer, I put a “found” ad in the newspaper. I posted her mugshot on Facebook. But no one claimed the cat. Nor did my other cat return home.
These days, Miss Kitty, as I refer to her, comes in to eat. She will stay in all night. She knows where the litter box is. Having a steady supply of nutritious food has given her energy. Her coat is less scruffy. A dose of worm medicine took care of her need to eat 24 hours a day. And now, the moment I sit down to knit, she trots across the kitchen, into the room where I sit and makes a flying leap through the air to land squarely in my lap where she purrs in a joyful before she curls up in a ball for snooze.
I guess I’m hers now.