A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.
~Jean Burden
“A kitten just fell out of the hayloft.” It was a simple statement, but one that didn’t sink in as I brushed my horse in our small barn.
“What?” I asked my husband, Mike. I was busy getting ready to train with the horse and slightly annoyed by the interruption.
“There’s a kitten on the ground.”
Sure enough, right beside my horse’s front right hoof, lay a mewing day-old kitten. It was mid-October, and the temperature was in the fifties. Mike gently picked up the little thing and said, “It feels cold.”
Earlier, we had heard what we thought were birds chirping. Instead, it was the small kitten, squeaking. It fell fifteen feet from the hayloft and landed right in front of my husband. Had it fallen a few minutes earlier or later, neither of us would have been there.
The day before, Mike and I had decided that we would be done with cats once our eighteen-year-old cat passed away. Our children were grown, and I was tired of litter-box duty. Besides, we now lived on Mike’s family farm that was close to Route 9, a death trap for any feline that frequented the outdoors. And we considered ourselves to be dog people anyway.
After we found the tiny black kitten, whose eyes were still closed, we searched the hayloft upstairs. There were no more kittens, and the mother cat, who we suspected was the black cat we had seen around the barn, was gone, too.
We took the kitten into the house and set up an electric heating pad under a green afghan my aunt had made me years ago, I snuggled the kitten while we called area shelters and researched how to care for her. I learned that if we could find another nursing mother cat, she might accept the kitten as one of her own. Many telephone calls later, we learned no one had a nursing mother cat. I researched online and found a homemade kitten formula recipe that I made and fed to the kitten with an eyedropper. The kitten was hungry and ate quickly. Then the little ball of fur yawned, stretched, and fell asleep on the warm afghan in my lap.
The next day, I visited our neighbors in search of the mother cat. One of them knew the mother because she lived behind their house. The kitten’s best chance for survival was to reunite with her mother so I brought the kitten over there. The neighbor promised to make sure the mother cat accepted the kitten. I didn’t know if the kitten would survive, but my husband and I had done what we could.
That winter we had record-breaking snowfall in Maine. It seemed snow fell every other day, sometimes more than twelve inches at a time. During one blizzard, I returned home early from my job as a child and family therapist. Mike was already home plowing and shoveling snow.
I came in the front door to find my husband standing there smiling. He asked if I remembered when we agreed not to have any more cats because we were really dog people. There on the kitchen floor was a tiny, black kitten playing with our large Lab mix, Luke. Mike explained that when he started shoveling the snow away from the barn doors, he saw a kitten running inside. He found her sitting on the steps to the hayloft. She did not run when he picked her up and placed her in his coat. He couldn’t believe she just sat there in his coat, happy to be warm, purring while he finished plowing snow.
The kitten appeared to be eight to nine weeks old. Could this be the same kitten we had helped earlier in the fall? The kitten playfully batted Luke’s ears, although the Lab looked a bit nervous and uneasy. Upon closer investigation, the kitten’s eyes appeared to be glued shut. They were severely infected. The drainage crusted over the fur surrounding her eyes, and she could not open them.
I washed the kitten’s eyes gently with warm water until she could open her eyes. A quick trip to the veterinarian provided antibiotic ointment for her eyes, de-wormer and her first shots. We named her Phoebe.
Phoebe quickly became part of our lives. She adored the old afghan — the green one we had used when we first rescued her — which happened to be on our king-sized bed on colder nights. As soon as I got done brushing my teeth and walked to my bed, a black flash would bolt onto that blanket for some playtime.
Soon enough, the tiny, black kitten became a beautiful, sleek cat that I dearly cared for. We always made sure that our windows had screens in them in the summer so she could not get outside due to the closeness of the major roadway. But we had a family member staying with us who took out a window screen to place a fan in the window. One day, I noticed Phoebe was not around and found the window upstairs left open. I searched for her for weeks, to no avail. I feared she had been injured or killed on the road.
About a month after Phoebe disappeared, I was in the barn feeding the horses when I heard a loud crying sound. It sounded familiar. I called out, “Here, kitty!” The cry grew louder. I looked up toward the eaves of the barn — the same place where a newborn kitten had fallen two years earlier. There, peering down at me, was a sleek, black cat, meowing loudly.
I ran up the hayloft stairs and called out, “Phoebe!” She came running, and I picked up my thinner but unharmed friend. I carried her out of the barn and inside the house so I could get a better look at her. It took me a moment to realize I was repeating “Thank God! Thank God!” as tears sprang to my eyes at the return of this dear pet.
A little underweight, but unharmed, Phoebe jumped onto the old green afghan on the couch. All was well with the world again. I loved this cat, no doubt about it. I guess we really weren’t just dog people after all.
~Janet Anderson-Murch
