Inner city kitties (the saga ends)

Saturday, October 27
I'm sitting at my computer drinking coffee when I hear a little mewing outside my house. I run to the window hoping to see a cute kitty who had come to visit, but expecting to find a piece of rusted metal squeaking in the wind, tempting me with its sweet sound and the promise of a fluffy animal in my paws. To my surprise, I found a momma cat and three tiny kittens. Determined to rescue these animals from cold, hunger and the back alleys of San Francisco, I call the city to see how to scoop them up and bring them in. They tell me that I have to rent traps and it could take several days and then I have to bring them in, all in separate cages. I start thinking of the logistics of catching four cats, renting cages, driving them somewhere and returning the cages, when I'm only home on the weekends and have a big trip coming up. I buy food and feed momma cat.

Sunday, October 28
I do more research on strays and the various options available. The SPCA says they have volunteers that can help. I leave a message.

Wednesday, October 31
I have to go to New York, early in the a.m. and won't be back until Monday night. I've been leaving food out for momma cat but am worried about them while I'm gone.

Monday, November 5
I was so worried that these kitties would have grown up and jumped over the fence while I was gone and wondered how the heck I was going to have time to capture them. I couldn't do anything until the weekend. I call and leave another message with the SPCA.

Tuesday, November 6
I keep feeding mom and eventually am able to pat her head and pet her a little. She's totally adorable, a little black and white kitty with a tail that curls alongside her and gets all animated when I pet her. I feed her up on the deck by my house, training her to get closer to me in anticipation of eventually trapping her and getting her spayed. The kittens still run when they see me and hide in the basement.

Wednesday, November 7
I hear back from someone at the SPCA that I need to get traps, etc. I leave another message imploring them to send me a volunteer, "I can't do this alone!" I say. Momma cat comes back over, she even comes in my house. She seems to want to be adopted. She's still nursing the kittens but definitely weaning them as she walks away a lot while they're feeding.

Thursday, November 8
Finally a woman named Michelle called. She's a volunteer with the SPCA and lives only a few blocks from my house. She arranged to meet me at my house that Saturday morning. She said we should start early, at the time I've seen them out there, which is usually around 6:30am.

Friday, November 9
I've become used to this routine of coming home and looking out my window to see the kitty. She looks up at me through the window and the kittens play in a little patch of dirt, wrestling and fighting each other.

Saturday, November 10
I make a big pot of coffee and Michelle arrives at 6:30am with three humane traps, towels and food. The kittens are nowhere to be seen but don't usually come out until mom does. Within an hour or so, mama cat came around looking for food. I didn't see the kittens but figured we should get started. I coax her into the trap and bingo! This was going to be easy.

Now there were the kittens, hiding in the basement. We set the trap with food in the doorway of the basement and I made meowing sounds to draw them out. I had to try a variety of places and configurations for the trap. I lined it with a bit of rug that I had put out weeks before for the family to sleep on. The brave one that usually scouts ahead of the two others came out looking for mom but saw me and ran back into the basement and past the trap again where curiosity got the better of this cat and it went in. Snap! Another one caught.

Next up, the timid duo. We set up the last trap in the same place and I again coaxed the cats with meowing (and had no idea at the time that this is something I would spend several nights doing). They came right out, side-by-side, but instead of going in the trap, wandered around it, crawling on top of it at. It was like they smelled the food but couldn't figure out how to get it. They mewed and mewed for mom. At the moment they caught a glimpse of a human they dashed back into the basement. This went on for a couple more hours, trying the trap in various places and meowing to beckon. Eventually, we gave up and decided to try again tomorrow. I was feeling pretty good though, this cat trapping thing was going to be easy.

Sunday, November 11
The next morning, Michelle and I were up early again. I tried the trap in a bunch of places, eventually putting it between the basement door and the outside, barricaded so that it's the only place to go. I do my cat crying bit and after a few tries they come out, SNAP! something goes into the trap. We check and it's only one, the braver of the two. I'm pretty sure they were together and now I'm thinking the runt is all alone and knows that a trap is not something to go into. We try the same trick with her but closer to the area of the basement where she's hiding. She won't come out at all. Michelle goes home and brings mom back and we try to use mom to coax her out. No such luck. Mom just gets stressed out hearing her kitten cry. I crawl into this dark cramped place covered in cobwebs to find her. Turns out she's in the wall, under the building, no where that I can go. We leave food out for her and give up for the day.

Monday, November 12
The next morning, the food looks untouched and I'm worried that the kitten is never coming out and doesn't even know how to eat. Michelle checks with someone that adopts kittens, shows her the other two and determines that they're old enough to eat food.

That night I saw the kitten in the backyard. I sneak downstairs and close the basement door. At least now it couldn't go into the walls, and I figure it will be easier to catch in the backyard. I hear it crying in the bamboo so I go in there and search every inch. Nothing, but I still hear the crying. I call Michelle and she comes over to help. We both, with flashlights, crawl around in the bamboo. We shake the stalks, we dig up leaves, we overturn everything. I chop half of the bamboo down out of sheer insanity. Then, I saw a small opening under the cement slab of the deck. We look in the hole and the kitten is crammed in there holding perfectly still like we won't see it. Michelle puts her hand in there to grab it and moments later it's gone. I have no idea where that goes but a few minutes later I hear crying up on the deck! I sneak up there and see it, nestled in between the cactus plants my neighbor grows - he literally has a hundred. I reach slowly, not wanting to startle her but then boing! she springs over to the wall separating us from the Salvation Army center next door. She runs along the wall, through a chain link fence and she's gone!

Tuesday, November 13
On the bus that morning, I cried thinking about that poor little kitty, gone from the safety of her birthplace, without her family, and no one to feed her.

When I get home from work, my neighbors are all out on the back deck. The kitten is next door in the parking lot the Salvation Army uses for donated cars. My neighbor Joe went over before they closed and left a dish of food out for the kitten. It's locked in now and crying its little guts out. It sounds like some poor animal is being tortured. The kitty is close to the fence so I imagine that it wants to get back to my yard, to look for its mom, but just doesn't know how. I call Michelle and she comes over, we survey the situation and decide to tackle it in the morning. I know there are guys over there in the morning when I get ready so we make a plan to go over there at 6am and ask if we can come in to catch the kitty.

When I get back to my place, Joe has shown me that if he pushes on the chain link fence, there's a way I can drop down over the wall and squeeze into the parking lot. I take a flashlight and spend the next hour chasing the crying cat all over the place. It's like a bad video game, "catch the crying kitty!" as it sneaks from car to car and I chase it with the help of my two neighbors with flashlights. "She's under the Volvo!" "Over here under the grey car!" "Now she's over by the boat" I finally give up and leave food, water and a set up of milk crates designed to help her get over the fence and into our yard.

Wednesday, November 14
Michelle gets another volunteer to help with the cat and I go to work. She reports later in the day that the kitten has now descended into the area when the trucks load and unload donations. She's deep into a pile of stuff and can't be retrieved. We're both worried that she isn't going to make it. We've never seen her eat food and she's been scared for several days now, her meowing sounding more and more stressed. Michelle leaves several traps around just in case. That night, I get home late and out of habit, look out my window. I see something moving around and focus to see the KITTEN BACK IN MY YARD! She's not making any noise, just milling around the old familiar places. I can't believe it. I call Michelle to tell her that our cat is not as helpless as we think and will probably be fine whether we catch her or not. I sneak downstairs and hold perfectly still for about 20 minutes. At one point she comes out of the bamboo close to me but not close enough to grab. And then, just like the miracle she performed a few days ago, I hear her meowing up on the deck. I go up there but don't see her and then hear the meowing from downstairs. I'm baffled so I leave a trap up on the deck. After three late nights of this, I'm tired.

Thursday, November 15
Not surprisingly, she's not in the trap and I don't hear or see her anywhere. At this point I'm ready to write her off as an alley cat. I'll leave food out and maybe sometime in the next year I'll capture her and get her fixed. I move the trap downstairs and cover it with bamboo. Then I go to work. That night I came home and heard nothing and saw nothing. I was kind of relieved, done with it. I ate and was about to go to bed when I remembered I had left a trap out. You're not supposed to leave the traps unattended because you can capture another animal or they can hurt themselves being scared in there for several hours but in this case, we were desperate. (In fact, one of the traps at the Salvation Army caught a big grey tomcat, a beautiful animal with huge teeth.) I approach the trap with a flashlight and think I see something in it but figure it's just the food bowl but as I get closer I see the KITTEN IN THE TRAP!

4 DAYS, 8 HOURS and 35 MINUTES into the chase, the jig is up. As Michelle and I walked back to her place with the kitten we named him or her, Chase.

Saturday, November 17
I do work around the house and while at my computer look out the window at least a dozen times. I miss those little kitties. Even though I know it's for the best, I liked having animals around. I hope they all have better lives than they would have had here.

Sunday, November 18
I hear birds this morning and see some sitting on the railing of my deck. It strikes me as something new and I wonder if the lack of a cat's presence welcomed the birds and I start to think about ripping out that f'ing bamboo and planting trees and a real garden. Maybe I could have bees and butterflies and birds visiting me on a regular basis. That would be okay too.