would have heard about it. You okay? Hey, sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m fine. I just wish I had known it was going to happen.”
“You did the right thing by calling us, though, Lucas. We’ll find good homes for any cats we find. Ready?”
I had grown completely bored with the monotonous noises and was busily wrestling with the kittens when I felt Mother Cat stiffen, alarm jolting through her. Her unwinking eyes were on the hole, and her tail twitched. Her ears were flat back against her head. I regarded her curiously, ignoring the little male kitty who ran up, swatted my mouth, and darted away.
Then a light blazed and I understood her fear. Mother Cat fled toward the back wall, abandoning her young. I saw her slip soundlessly into the hidden crack just as two humans came in through the hole. The kittens milled in confusion, the male cats fled to the back of the den, and I shied away, afraid.
The light danced along the walls, then found me, blazing brightly in my face.
“Hey! There’s a puppy in here!”
Two
“Hey kitty-kitty!” The woman crawled forward, reaching out. On her hands, thick cloth was redolent with traces of many different animals, mostly cats.
The kittens reacted by darting away in terror. Their flight was chaotic and without direction, and none of them ran to the crack in the wall where Mother Cat hid, though I could smell her in there, cowering and afraid. The other adult cats were little better, though they were mostly frozen, staring in dread at the approaching human. One of them broke for the hole and snarled when the woman caught him in her heavy mittens. She handed him carefully back to another pair of cloth-covered hands. Two more adults made it past her and out to freedom.
“Did you catch them?” the woman asked loudly.
“One of them!” came the answering shout. “The other one got away.”
As for me: I knew what I should do. I should go be with my mother. But something in me rebelled against this reaction—instead, I felt enticed by the woman wriggling toward me, fascinated by her. A compulsion seized me: though I had never experienced human touch, I had an acute sense of how it would feel, as if remembering something from long ago. The woman gestured toward me with her hands even as the rest of the adult cats bolted out the hole behind her. “Here, puppy!” I bounded forward, straight into her arms, my little tail wagging.
“Oh my God, you’re a cutie!”
“We caught two more!” shouted a voice from outside.
I licked the woman’s face, wiggling and squirming.
“Lucas! I’ve got the puppy, can you reach in and take him?” She lifted me up and examined my tummy. “Take her, I mean. She’s a girl.”
The man who had been bringing us food for the bowls appeared at the hole, his familiar smell flooding in. His hands reached out and gently wrapped themselves around me, and then he brought me out into the world. My heart was pounding, not in terror, but in total joy. I could still feel the kittens behind me, sense their fright, and Mother Cat was strong in the air, but right then I just wanted to be held by the man, to chew his fingers and pounce on him when he set me down and rolled me around in the cool dirt.
“You are so silly! You are such a silly puppy!”
While we played, the woman brought out the kittens one at a time and handed them to two men who put them into cages on the back of a truck. The little kitties were mewing in distress. Their appeals saddened me, because I was their big sister, but I could do nothing to help them. I expected that our mother would soon be joining them, and knew they would feel better then.
“I think we got them all,” the woman said, coming over to where I was playing with the man. “Except for the ones that ran out.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. Your guys got theirs but I wasn’t any good at catching them.”
“It’s okay. It takes a lot of practice.”
“What will happen to the ones who took off?”
“Well, hopefully they won’t come back right away, if the workers are going to tear down the houses.” The woman knelt down to stroke my ears. Having attention from two humans at once was simply the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. “There weren’t any other dogs. I