I was in the yard minding my own business when a little shadow fell across my path. First, I thought Pasha had somehow gotten out (okay, I didn't have my glasses on). Bending down, I realized that this was a perfect Pasha Mini-Me. Lah-di-dah, here I am.
Of course, I immediately called our shelter, the local vet and the police department. Yes, around here, they do take "missing pets" reports! One of the advantages of living in a small community. He is also going up on the Facebook page of our local newspaper.
What I don't understand is why nobody has been looking for him. If my Pasha or Lilliput were missing, I'd be caterwauling all over town.
Anyway, here is the "shy" little fellow. And, no, I haven't named him (yet):
No, this is not Pasha.
This is my question from Pasha's book. It bears repeating:
How Do They Find
me?
Yes, how do they? Those lost and hungry ones that keep
showing up at my door.
Shortly after I moved
into my house which overlooks a golf course, there was the nightly gray shadow
framed in a lower pane of my French door. Glowing eyes peered in but vanished
as soon as I tiptoed close. I assumed it was a cat though I never really got a
good look at my nocturnal visitor.
Then, sadly, on a warm
spring day, a gleaming black cat lay under my deck, soaking up the first warm
rays. When it hadn’t moved after a couple of hours, I realized that it was half
comatose—most likely poisoned by eating a d-Con-sickened
mouse. All I could do was to place her on a warm towel until her little spirit
was claimed. The next day, I dug a peaceful spot in the woods.
The rustle of dry
leaves alerted me to another visitor. Way back under the deck, I could see
white fur emerge from a leafy hiding place. I watched in awe as the obviously
still very young creature toddled out into the sun. The white of its fur turned
out to be only a stripe down its back; the rest of the little thing was black.
“Well, where is your
mommy, little fellow?” I asked and bent down to get a closer look. Then I went
about my garden chores. It wobbled after me everywhere I went until, exhausted
at last, it came to rest on some hot pebbles. Afraid that it might get roasted
under the glaring sun, I got a towel and very gingerly placed it on the soft
cloth. Then I went inside, and searched on the computer for ‘rearing a baby
skunk.’
The first sentence
immediately caught my attention. It stated with great authority: Whatever you do, do not talk to it or it
will follow you everywhere. Been there, done that, thank you very much.
Next. By the time I had read about the very real possibility of ‘getting
skunked, especially by a baby,’ I wasn’t quite so enthusiastic anymore to
befriend the little fellow. Thankfully, his mama must have shown up because
when I went back out, he had disappeared.
As for those finding
me, I shall discount the turtles, the azalea-ravenous deer, the pin-striped
chipmunks, the crafty raccoon and those squirrely high-wire artists, the
hosta-nibbling rabbits, and even the tunneling armadillos. One time, I saw
eighteen wild turkeys on patrol coming up the fairway.
None of them are lost.
They simply come for dinner. I suspect what attracts them is the daily
replenishment of the bird feeders. One winter morning, I counted thirteen
brilliant cardinals pecking at the seeds that had fallen to the ground, while
six deer licked up the rest and then proceeded to ‘dead-head’ the ornamental
bushes.
I was delighted with
my new closeness to nature. In an effort to help me with my transition from
city-dweller to rural recluse, someone explained to me that a titmouse is a little bird; not a
well-endowed rodent.
Despite lame
protestations on my part, my reputation as the ‘cat lady’ grew around town. Naturally,
a concerned neighbor came bearing a beautiful blue-eyed feline.
Hoping that the cat
would go back to her owners somewhere in the neighborhood, I left her on my
deck while I went shopping (the nearest supermarket is sixteen miles away).
Some hours later, she was still there, exactly where I had left her. In my
book, such persistence called for a reward, and my then Himalayan cat Tiffany—who was already seventeen and
had come with me from San Diego, moaning every single mile of the way—was glad
to give up some of her rations for the—I assumed—starving cat although her
belly looked quite round. That our visitor had strong Himalayan markings and
the most beautiful blue eyes herself didn’t help my recent resolve not to get
involved with roaming critters.
Zoe—I had to call her something when I spoke to her—followed
me like a little dog (you would think I’d learned my lesson with the baby
skunk). I walked the whole neighborhood (less for exercise than hoping to find
her owner). She stayed hard on my heels every step of the way.
As the nights turned
cold, I cautiously brought her inside after de-critterizing her and a trip to
the vet for a rabies shot. I might be an animal lover but I do draw a stringent
line when it comes to fleas and ticks. Zoe
immediately jumped onto my best chair and contentedly went to sleep.
What I myself could
not ignore was the nagging suspicion of ‘what if?’ She appeared almost too
roly-poly for a cat that had been fending for herself, even if it had been for
only a couple of days.
Reason prevailed and I
took her to the shelter where she quickly became a favorite. Her girth grew
markedly and she was officially pronounced pregnant. One morning, Zoe started to act differently in her
outside cage. Naturally, I got exited and urged the shelter manager to drop
everything and come quickly.
“James, James! I think
Zoe is about to give birth. We’ll
have to take her inside. Hurry!”
“I’ll be right there,”
the imperturbable shelter manager called back from one of the dog pens and,
much too slowly in my mind, made his way to Zoe’s cage. “Haven’t you ever seen
kittens being born?”
I had never witnessed
the birth of anything. It was amazing. Out popped the first dark
membrane-hulled bundle. Zoe had it
cleaned off and settled before the next appeared. Over the span of the next
hour, she had six healthy kittens.
Eventually, Zoe was adopted together with one of her
boys. One of her girls, Freya, even
went to live in Indiana and the shelter regularly received news from her
family, always glowing about how much happiness she brought to them.
I realized that I was
not being singled out by these homeless critters. The shelter is bursting with
animals that other soft-hearted residents and visitors have rescued. They found
them starving, begging on their doorstep, cowering in ditches covered with
ticks and fleas, panting on the road still waiting for their heartless owners
to return. They don't, of course, having tied their dog to a bridge railing
assuming that ‘some fool’ was sure to rescue it.
It was early evening
when neighbors rang my doorbell with, ‘Look what we found.’ In the setting sun,
the shepherd-retriever mix gleamed golden like a fine Mexican Fire Opal.
I begged a can of dog food from the dog next door. Tico was a very small dog with a big
heart—and an even bigger supply of canned food. For some reason, that little
Chihuahua loved me and came running every time I was out in the yard, and he
and his kind ‘mama’ were taking their ‘evening constitutional.’ I think it was
the first time that it vaguely dawned on me that dogs are wonderful creatures,
and most of the time they have other things on their mind than to bite into the
first leg they see. They want to be noticed and patted and talked to.
As dusk turned into
night, I hoped someone would come looking for Opal. She would not come up on the rug I had put out for her on my
deck but she contentedly settled down on my lawn, watching the road. I figured
that, if she was still there the next day, I would have the Animal Control Officer
take her to the shelter.
I patted her and
talked to her, and even rubbed her tummy. That’s when I discovered that she had
been tattooed with a blue S, and I
figured that it meant she had been spayed.
During all this, I
completely forgot about my great fear of dogs, and we waited together for quite
a while. No one came to look for her.
I had just sat down to
dinner when I noticed the lights of a suspiciously slow-moving car coming down
my dead-end street. I dashed outside and waited for the car to turn around in
the cul-de-sac and come back. Sure enough, when the people saw me they stopped
and their faces brightened. The man leaned out of his window with a relieved
smile.
Eureka, I rejoiced inwardly, it
has to be them.
“You must be looking
for your dog." I pointed a hopeful finger at Opal standing next to me, tail wagging.
"Sorry," the
driver sighed. "We are from Iowa, and
we are lost."
Really! How
do they find me?
