Saving A Kitten

Laying in bed with a candy hangover, I kept hearing a strange bird cry outside my open window. It sounded like a kitten. There are birds here that convincingly imitate the varied shrieks of car alarms, so I drifted in and out of sleep.

I heard children go by, and figured it must be a bird or they would have stopped and done something with the kitten.

But it persisted. I got dressed and dragged ManPants in to listen. We decided to investigate.

As soon as we turned the corner, we knew it was a kitten. At first, we thought it was coming from the air-conditioning unit. We searched for some sort of opening but couldn’t find one; the fan wasn’t running so I peered through the slats on the top but didn’t see anything in its dark interior. Finally, we realized it was coming from the building directly behind the air-conditioning unit. We couldn’t see a hole – there were bushes in the way and it was too close to ground – but could see dirty shreds of pink insulation on the ground. There was another dirty shred of insulation that still hung from the building, so we figured that must be where the hole was.

Needless to say, we weren’t too excited about this realization. We’ll do anything we can to save an animal in distress (we’ve rescued ducklings from storm drains three times – which is neither clean nor easy) but would prefer not to lie in dirt and stick an arm into fiberglass to do it.

But the kitten responded to our voices with its own as we discussed what to do, so ManPants started to meow in response. It’s cries slowly became clearer as he did this, so I joined in too, until we could hear it as if it was standing next to us. And then finally, miraculously, a little grey and white nose peeked out.

A mewling little kitten stumbled out.

We could hear children coming so I snatched up the kitten as quickly as possible (previous experience with some of the children in our apartment complex makes me distrust them around vulnerable living things). It was big enough to just spill out of my hand, with blue eyes lined in crust. With tiny, razor sharp claws, it wandered up my arm and toward my face, searching for – as far as I could tell – some food.

The two children immediately came to see the kitten. The little girl spoke to me but I was mildly surprised that I couldn’t understand her. While she talked to her brother, I tried to figure out what language they were speaking. Luckily, the little boy spoke English; he translated a little for his sister. He asked where it came from, what I would do with it (“I don’t know,” I said. ManPants and I would love to have cats but have no good space in the apartment for a litter box. While I talked to the kids, he was on the phone with his parents trying to figure out what we could do with it.). The little girl wanted to hold it and immediately cradled it in her arms like a baby. They wanted to keep it.

“If you go ask your parents, and they say it’s okay, then you can keep it,” I said.

The little boy’s jumped up, excited, exclaiming as he ran off, “Okay, but stay right here, okay?”

The little girl tried to converse with me while we waited. I felt bad that I couldn’t. I had finally recognized that they were speaking in Spanish but my high school Spanish from ten years ago completely failed me. All I could say was, “No comprendo.”

Very soon, the boy came back. His parents said it was okay. ManPants and I put the kitten in a box and followed them to their door, where their parents stood. After a short conversation, watching the little girl silence the kitten by cradling it again, they said, “We’ll keep it. She loves it.”

So I saved a kitten and found it a home in the space of about 10 minutes today. If that doesn’t get me a massive amount of good karma (can I apply it to Tuesday??), I don’t know what will.