Love And Sorrow

I was never going to have a cat. There’s nothing wrong with cats, but with my allergies, living with a cat didn’t seem possible. Then, in the spring of 2020, a stray cat had kittens in my scrap wood pile. I thought it would be handy having a few cats around the property, so I cut a cat door in the wall of my shop and started putting food and water inside, to encourage her to move her kittens in and stick around.

It worked great. Between her and her kittens, I started to notice a significant decrease in the pest population on our little country acre. On top of that, the cats eventually all got comfortable enough with us that the kids could pet and play with them. My middle daughter named the mama cat Rocky Road, because of her mottled, chocolate coloring. It was my intention to catch Rocky and have her spayed as soon as the kittens were weened, but she disappeared before I could. When she returned several weeks later, it was clearly too late to prevent another pregnancy.

In the fall, she had a litter of eight kittens behind the front tire of a silver Trailblazer that was sitting, dead, in my yard. There were two little black and white kittens, one solid black, two gray, and three orange. I left them there, for the first few days, but it was an unusually cold year. I worried about the kittens being outside during the night. My kids and I had already made a place for the kittens in the shop, and I started putting food and water near the box to encourage Rocky to move her kittens inside. Again, she moved them right in.

Kittens grow fast. After three weeks, most of the kittens had turned from squinty-eyed, little peanuts into walking, climbing fuzzballs. Most of them had. Eight kittens is a lot for a mother cat to feed, and the two black and white kittens were starving. I didn’t know what to do for them. My middle daughter asked if we could feed them.

“Of course,” I said, “They make kitten formula. We can try. It’s better than just letting them die.”

I was exhausted. I work ten-hour shifts, overnight, and I was ready for bed. Still, I would have felt like a monster if I hadn’t done everything I reasonably could to save those kittens. I drove across town to the only pet store, to get kitten formula and two bottles, while my daughter brought the kittens in and made a shoebox bed for them on her bedside table. An hour later, following the instructions on the label, we had two little bottles of formula and were feeding kittens for the first time in our lives.

The kittens managed to eat a little bit, each. We were hopeful. I went to bed, leaving my daughter instructions for how often I thought she should feed the kittens and when to make new bottles, but I hadn’t even nodded off, when she came in and informed me one of the kittens had died. I got up and buried it in our yard, near the fence line, in a place I have reserved for our passed pets. I went back to bed and slept, restlessly miserable that, for all our effort, we couldn’t save the kitten. When I woke that evening, my daughter told me the other one had died, as well, about an hour after I went to bed. She had buried it next to its sibling.

Over the next week or two, the other six kittens had really started getting around. They were wandering out of the shop and exploring the yard. I found them everywhere; in the flowerbeds, under the front porch, poking around the old, broken chicken coop. Rocky moved them around, some, too, to feed them in smaller groups. I even found one in the floorboard of my sister-in-law’s Durango, one evening, when she’d left her windows down. I tried to make sure they were all back in the shop by sundown, to protect them from coyotes and other predators, and I checked on them most mornings.

Wednesday morning, two weeks after the tragic loss of the two smallest, I checked on the kittens, and one of the orange ones was starving. I hadn’t checked on them in a couple of days, and he didn’t look like he would survive the day. Again, I was exhausted after a long night of staring at screens, but we had the kitten formula and the bottles, and I’d be damned if I was going to let another kitten die while there was still something I could do.

I brought him in and made a bottle, but he was too weak even to suckle at the rubber nipple. Desperate, I searched for a syringe and couldn’t find one. I found a straw and unscrewed the cap from the formula bottle. Using my finger to stop one end of the straw, I began poking the straw into the bottle and pulling up a few drops of formula, at a time. I dripped formula, drop by drop, into the mouth of my hungry kitten, and although it made quite a mess on his face, he was able to swallow some.

I fed him until he stopped eating, then I cleaned the formula off his face and paws and held him against my chest to keep him warm. He was very thin and shivered sometimes, but he slept. He was so small I was able to cover him entirely with one hand. I had the next three nights off, so I spent the day with my kitten. I napped with him on my chest, and I fed him every hour to ninety minutes.

The next morning, I was sitting at the dining table, feeding my kitten, while my wife got ready to go to work. “We’re going to have a cat in the house, aren’t we?” she joked.

“Honestly, he can stay in the house, if he’ll just live,” I told her. It was not actually my intention to keep him in the house, at the time. I was still allergic to cats. My plan was to try to nurse him until he was healthy enough to put back outside with the other cats. By mid-day, Thursday, he was strong enough to drink from the bottle instead of having formula dripped all over his little face.

On Saturday, my daughters decided it was time to name the kittens. I named my kitten Pumpkin. He was doing much better, and I felt good about his chances of survival. I also named the solid black kitten, Shadow. The middle daughter named the other two orange kittens Milo and Trumpy. My youngest daughter had been calling the largest gray kitten Bob, for some time, and nobody could agree on a name for the other gray kitten. We decided it could wait a day or two.

I was working from home that night, but before I started my shift, I went outside to make sure the kittens were all in the shop. In addition to my normal concerns for their overnight safety, we had an ice storm coming in that night. The storm turned out to be one of the worst we’d had in several years.

Through the night, I sat in front of my computer, watching my monitoring apps, listening to the storm outside and being grateful that my rural wireless internet was holding out. Pumpkin slept on my chest and took feedings every couple of hours. At the end of my shift, it was still coming down, but I went out in it to check on the kittens. Outside, I found a scene that made me choke. Trumpy and Shadow were frozen, in my driveway.

I don’t know why they came out of my warm, dry shop in such awful weather. Maybe they wandered out before the storm began and couldn’t find their way back in, after it started. Whatever the reason, I knew the kittens always explored together, and, with tears in my eyes, I ran to the shop to check on the rest. Their box was empty.

I whistled to let them know I was in the shop. Sometimes the kittens hid away in a corner of my shop, but they always came out when I whistled. One kitten responded. Milo mewed and came bounding at me from under the riding lawnmower. I scooped him up in one hand and searched the shop as thoroughly as I could. They were all gone.

I took Milo in and woke my middle daughter up. I handed her the kitten and told her I had to go back outside, and that she should prepare bottles for Pumpkin and Milo. I spent about an hour looking all over my property for the other kittens. After finding no sign of them or their mother, I moved Shadow and Trumpy out of the driveway. The ground was frozen, and I wouldn’t be able to bury them for a few days, at least.

I went back inside and told my daughter about the kittens. I told her Shadow and Trumpy had died in the storm, and the others were all missing. The mother cat may have taken them somewhere, I told her, but it was also important to be prepared for the eventuality that they might be gone, for good. Either way, we couldn’t put Milo back outside, and we certainly couldn’t put Pumpkin back out. They were still nursing, and there was no telling if Rocky would be back to feed them.

So I offered my daughter a deal. We had two kittens who were going to need regular feedings, now, and I had to sleep sometime. If she would help me take care of them, including cleaning the litter box when they got old enough to use one, she could keep Milo as her pet, and Pumpkin would be mine.

It wasn’t long before we had to start transitioning them to solid food, especially Milo, who was biting the nipples off his bottles. Rocky did show up again, about a week after the storm, on the first warm, sunny day we had, but by that time, we’d already determined Pumpkin and Milo would remain inside. She still had one kitten in tow, Bob, who looked rough, at first, but quickly became the roliest poliest little feral cat, since there were no other kittens to compete with for mom’s milk.

Pumpkin still mostly slept and ate. He was small enough to fit into my shirt pocket, where he frequently slept when I had to do chores like cooking dinner or folding laundry. As he grew, he started spending more time awake and playing with Milo. Because of the malnutrition he’d experienced, Pumpkin was a little oddly built. He had unusually large eyes and long back legs that made him bounce when he ran. He was adorable, and I was in love with him.

Today, Pumpkin is smaller than his brothers, but he’s fully grown and healthy. His eyes are still a little bit big for his head. He’s very friendly, and he still climbs on my shoulders and sleeps on my chest, sometimes. He doesn’t fit under my hand or in my pocket anymore, but that doesn’t stop him from trying. I think putting a paw in my pocket reminds him of being a kitten and comforts him, in some way.

I went to see an allergy specialist, who put me on a variety of medications to control my allergies. We are a cat family, now, and although it was all the result of a tragic series of events, I’m so happy to have Pumpkin in my life.