The little girl, who birthed a few weeks ago, over off Clover Ridge, in Albany, is tame. I suspected she was, after the old couple who feed her had trapped her, a week before I had anywhere to get her fixed. So I housed her here in a rabbit hutch. I took her sole surviving kitten, only three weeks old, whom she had abandoned when she went into heat again. I bottle fed him a couple of nights, bought more KMR to do it, which cost me, then pawned him off to Heartland.
His mom was fixed Friday, along with the seed warehouse boys and five from a Corvallis business. I was set to return her Sunday. However, I found out she is completely tame. She's a munchkin scottish fold cross and tiny, young to boot. So fragile, so grateful and happy to be petted again.
I call the old couple and tell them. I ask them to take her in as a house cat. They say "We already have a house cat, but we'll ask around." They want me to come get my trap.
They have donated nothing and resentment rises within me. I know they will not "ask around". I know they have shoved it all off on me without a moment of guilt. I know that they never even attempted to catch the white male so he could be fixed, after trapping the female even though they claimed they did. I know a clean untouched trap when I see one. It was, after all, my trap, I'd left them to catch him with.
I finally go to get the trap, feeling like a slave. I ask them for a donation, telling them I am just a volunteer and have to pay out for all I've done for them. The woman turns from the couch. A movie is on hold on the big screen, a black actor face frozen. Like hers. She wasn't expecting this. He fishes a $10 bill out of his wallet. It's an insult amount for all the help they got, all I put out. They have to know that. They'd pay a kid more, to mow their tiny yard. I want to get into it with him over all the expenses I've incurred, but I don't. I'm too tired. I know what they'll say, have heard it so many times I could repeat all the excuses in a thousand different voices by now.
$10. My mind wanders to my dash to Petco, for KMR, after I took the bottle boy, my first visit there. They had called, said she abandoned him. I thought they would at least have him in their house, but no. They'd locked him in a carrier outside--a kitten just a couple weeks old. I remember staring at the price of the KMR at Petco, thinking I should not be doing this, but grabbing it anyway, justifying it in my mind somehow, wanting to feed that little hungry boy out screaming in my car, trying to shove aside my worries about like paying the electric bill, so I could just feel good about something, like saving that little boy out there.
$10. I bought an off brand in the end. A powdered kitten milk replacement I'd never heard of before, but it was so much cheaper than the KMR, only $12 instead o $16 for the can of powder. I felt a little bit easier on myself for going for that lesser brand at least.
$10. She went all the way to Portland with me to be fixed at the FCCO. The FCCO suggests a donation of $30 per cat. I had nothing to give them. I told them the Corvallis business and the seed farm would pay, that they said they would, online. They did say that. No, neither has paid a dime yet, but, well I couldn't just get 9 more local cats fixed and offer up nothing to the FCCO. I will keep at those two businesses. I had to pay my own gas up and back. I had to pay to feed those cats in my garage until the day they could be fixed. And now I still have the little girl.
$10. I say absolutely nothing, walk out of their spotless garage that reeks of some chemical and load my trap and drive away. I'm already so lonely I can barely bare the weight of the day in and day out vacancy of human contact. To be basically spat upon too, it's hard on me.
The morality of returning a tame desperate little life, dumping her out alongside that cold house, I couldn't do it. I hope I can find her somewhere. I hope. I hope.
I'd received a message from someone wanting to adopt. I called them back saturday but got her husband. At first I thought he was supportive, because he asked about my trapping and all that. But it turns out he wanted to scream at me, blame me for all bird deaths in the entire world, for returning fixed ferals and not killing them. A dangerous illiterate over educated bird freak. Or someone off their meds.
The bizarre twist is he wants to adopt an unfixed kitten and was lamenting that Heartland Humane in Corvallis fixes all kittens prior to adoption. (Why they would call me, in their search, the most rabid spay neuter person I have ever met, is beyond reason!) I tried to point out the ridiculous contradiction in his thinking, with his hatred of free roaming cats paired with his wish that shelters would adopt out unfixed kittens, which would only drastically increase numbers of unwanted, feral and free roaming little killers. He ranted on about killing free roaming cats until I hung up on him so I could get on with my life. I had already suggested he turn his bird lovers wrath to good use, by destroying cell and radio towers, pesticide manufacturing plants, shooting down airplanes, smashing glass everywhere he can find it, blowing up cars, taking out bird feeders and even destroying wineries since they shotgun to death zillions of birds to keep them off their grapes. However,. and typically, he wanted to focus on cats. So much easier! Even stranger, he used to volunteer with the Feral Cat Coalition. Some people are best left unpondered.
I miss Feather. Some days, I miss my mother and think, before I remember she's long gone, I'll just call her. We never talked even when she was alive. I was always the one thrown out. I can't contrive up a new history for myself. Fact is, I've never had anybody love me in my life. I probably never will either. The loneliness is brutal. I've been alone so long.
But I will tell you what, I'm not sorry I saved that little boy and his mom. I'm not sorry at all.
All you cold hearted people out there, sitting on your cash, cuddling up, fuck you.
I remember the cartoon that saved my life.
I was in the brutal cold mental health system, a system designed to benefit drug companies. There was no escape I could see. My friends were all dying, either from the drugs themselves, forced on them, the interactions, unmonitored, or by suicide as they left such a hopeless life.
After being beaten by staff at Portland Adventist Hospital, released into a snow and ice storm that year, two days before Christmas, no shoes or coat, I left that damn mental "health" treatment that had brutalized me and stolen my life. I struggled so, in such pain, after the beating, when the medical system called my physical problems from the beating "symptoms of mental illness."
I would have given up, the pain was so severe, both emotional, from being so unwanted and unloved, and physical, but I came upon a cartoon. It saved me then and it saves me still.
Isn't that funny a cartoon saved me? I think it is. I think it is hysterical that cats and a cartoon saved me. Not Jesus. Not social services. Cats and a cartoon!
The cartoon showed a huge eagle swooping in on its prey, talons thrust out for the kill. The mouse knew there was no hope. As that eagle swooped in, the mouse thrust up a middle finger! The cartoon was entitled "The Last Great Act of Defiance."
