Compass & Quill

Trigger Warning: This post contains a graphic description of an animal’s death.

Do not read this. I wish I didn’t even have to write it, but it has to go somewhere.

I’m going to tell you the story of something awful. Maybe you’re the kind of person who will read it and think that I’m ridiculous. Maybe you’re the kind of person who will read it and grieve. Hopefully you’re the kind of person who isn’t at all curious, so you stopped reading when I told you to (which means you’re not reading this, so no clue why I’m still talking to you). But there’s always the possibility that you’ll read this and notice some parallels to the world outside of my backyard, as I have. Fuck it, maybe do read this.

For context, I live in a suburban neighborhood on a single-block street. The houses are a mix of mid-century brick and mid-pandemic bland. The neighbors are a mix of young/old, Black/white, nice enough/total shitheads. There’s nothing special about this street, except for the cats.

Our town has a preponderance of feral cats. There’s a great organization that’s working hard to trap/neuter/release, but they can’t catch them all, and for some reason it seems like all of the pregnant ones end up living in the backyard of an abandoned house not too far from ours.

Last year, I found an abandoned newborn kitten in the front yard of that house. I was able to keep her alive for a few days, but I couldn’t find a rescue to take her. She was a tiny calico cat, and her name was Agnes. She’s buried under the spiral ginger in my backyard.

A couple of months ago, I found an older kitten in my front yard. He was lethargic, so I put him in my bathroom until I could figure out what to do with him. Within a few minutes, he had a seizure. We went to the vet. He had another seizure in the car, then another in the waiting room. The vet advised me that the most merciful choice would be to euthanize him. We’d known each other for less than an hour, and now I was being asked to murder him. When I told the vet tech that I’d stay in the room with him as he fell asleep, she commended me for my kindness. I didn’t know what she was talking about. It wasn’t kindness. It was the very least I could do. He was a baby. Of course I stayed with him.

A couple of summers ago, one of the grown neighborhood cats started visiting our yard on a regular basis. She was sleek black, a lanky little panther. She didn’t trust humans, but she’d sun herself on our back patio sometimes, and I think she slept on our patio furniture every now and then, too. Her home base was the house across the street, but she was in our yard somewhat regularly. Often at night, the dogs would beg to go outdoors, then chase something around the yard to the space under our garden shed. I never saw what they were chasing, but I assumed it was an opposum. Now I wonder if it was the cat.

A week or two ago, I caught the black cat unawares as I walked out of our side door into the carport. She paused and looked at me in fear, then scurried across the street. Her belly looked bigger than usual, and I wondered if she might be pregnant with spring kittens. I sighed as I thought about the work it would entail to safely catch them once they’d grown. I also thought briefly about the space under the shed, and how it would make the perfect spot for a pregnant mama to hide her babies. I made a mental note to buy chicken wire, lest we end up with a litter of kittens in the backyard.

Last Thursday started strangely. I woke up in a panic. My alarm hadn’t gone off, and it was an hour later than I’d intended to wake up. I rushed to the kitchen to make coffee, then fed the dogs and let them out to the backyard while I sat down to start work.

A few minutes later, the dogs started barking. That’s nothing new; our nextdoor neighbors have four or five scrappy little dogs in their backyard, and our dogs and theirs get into shouting matches daily. Typically, as soon as the barking starts, I call them back inside with the bribe of a cookie. With that in mind, I got up to walk to the back door. Before I could get there, I heard my little dog yelping in pain (which also isn’t new–he’s a total drama queen). Even so, I ran outside to check.

From where I was standing, the dogs were blocked from view by my raised garden beds, but the little dog wasn’t yelping anymore, and the big dog was barking up a storm. I called them to me, and they came running over. As soon as they started in my direction, I saw the source of the commotion: the black cat. She raced out from around the garden beds and along the back of the fenceline to the back of the garden shed. I knew she’d be safe there; there’s no room for the dogs. I turned to get them back inside and leave her in peace. Then I heard the unmistakeable sound of quick footsteps crossing over the pile of scrap wood at the side of the shed, and my heart sank. Sure enough, a black streak flew down the side of our yard.

In an instant, I knew she was trying to make a break for our garden gate. The gate hangs high enough for a cat to squeeze under, and I’d watched her do it before. I called the dogs to stay with me, but the thrill of the chase was too much, and they ran in her direction. I ran after them and rounded the corner in time to see her turning back from the door and facing off with my big dog. She took a step and toppled over, and the big dog stood over her, deeply sniffing her fur (that’s his thing–he loves to smell his cat friends indoors, too). The black cat didn’t like that (of course), and she swatted him in the nose and scrambled away awkwardly.

This gave me enough time to grab the big dog by the scruff and drag him back to the porch. The little dog followed. By then, my partner had come out to the back porch to see what all the commotion was about. Of course, as soon as their dad opened the door, the dogs ran back inside. As far as they were concerned, they’d had a fun adventure and now it was time for a snack.

Chaos contained, I walked back around to the side of the house, expecting the black cat to have escaped under the fence in the meantime. She was standing where I’d left her, beside the garden hose reel, backed into a corner. Her tail was still puffed out. She took a step to escape, but her legs didn’t move together and she toppled over. I called for my partner to bring me a towel so I could safely pick her up and go to the vet. He ran back inside. The black cat panted and tilted her head back at me, eyes wide. She didn’t look scared so much as confused, like she was asking me why this was happening. For a second I thought that maybe she was OK, just in shock. Then she coughed up blood. Her head tilted toward the ground, mouth open, eyes wide. She was dead before my partner came back with the towel.

What do you call what came next? Anguished sobs? Wracking, primal howl? The sound of the emptiness punching its way out of your guts? However you cut it, I freaked the fuck out, buckled over, wailing, struggling to breathe, unable to stop shaking. My partner didn’t know what to do. He held me and made soft cooing noises until I calmed down. Then he went into the house to get a box.

While he was inside, my neighbor called to me from the other side of the gate. She’d heard me from inside her house and had come over in her pajamas. I stood beside the dead cat and tried to explain to my neighbor, a woman whose child died in a gun accident a few years ago, that I was crying for a stray cat. I apologized for disturbing her peace, and she said something banal and hurried back inside. I looked down at the black fur and started crying again. Later I wondered if maybe it would have made more sense if I’d explained the part about the cat being pregnant. Somehow I doubt it.

I wrapped the black cat in a gauze curtain that I’d used to protect my vegetable bed from frost earlier this year. I put her in the Amazon box my partner brought me. It was just big enough, but she couldn’t fold up her paws for me, so I had to do it for her. I tried to be gentle. It felt rude to hold her. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her fur with my bare hand, but I could still feel how silky it was through her curtain shroud. She was heavy. Her kittens were heavy. I folded up the box top and handed her over to my partner, who dug a hole for her at our back fence line.

Over the course of that day, I cycled things through over and over. To an outsider, it would be easy to believe that the dogs had killed her. That’s what I assumed at first, too. But the narrative didn’t fit what I’d seen. Something was missing. The dogs get excited about cats, yes, but they also live with three of them. It’s also true that they chase things that run, but it’s always to sniff them (as I’d seen the big dog doing). I knew that the cat wasn’t bitten or shaken. So what had happened?

She was fine when she ran around the yard, and she was fine when she ran out from the side of the shed. She could possibly have been injured and moving solely on adrenaline, but I think if that had been the case, she’d have stopped and taken cover at the shed. That left the 20 or 30 seconds between when I saw her run toward the gate and when I cleared the corner of the house and had an unobstructed view. When I rounded the corner, I saw her standing with her back to the gate, facing off against the big dog. Then she fell. I’d thought it was fright, but what if it was some other kind of impairment?

Wait. She ran to the gate because she knew she could squeeze under it. So why hadn’t she? Had the dogs blocked her path? No, she was in front of them. It didn’t make sense.

I mulled it over all day and slept on it that night. Yesterday morning I woke up with an idea, so I went back to the gate to see if I could find clues. I did.

The black cat was pregnant. She was scared. She was being chased by stupid dogs that just wanted to sniff her, but all she knew was that her babies were in danger. She ran for a familiar point of safety: the garden gate. She’d squeezed under this fence before.

But she wasn’t pregnant then.

There were multiple deep grooves from her back claws in the dirt under the gate. They were in two different spots under the gate, and they faced multiple directions, like she’d been kicking wildly. Some of her fur was caught in the wood of the gate, and a piece of plywood that was partially under the gate was broken and smashed down. She’d been trying as hard as she could to squeeze through, shoving herself at the too-small space over and over. It was primal instinct. She was fighting for her life and the lives of her children. But there just wasn’t room for her babies and her organs to fit through the available space. Something inside her ruptured, and she began bleeding internally. By the time she gave up and turned around, she was dying. We just didn’t know it yet.

There were two dried blood patches on the pavers beside the hose reel. I’d only seen her spit blood once. I wondered if the second spot had happened because her mouth was open when she died. Then I remembered that I didn’t close her eyes when I put her in the box, and felt sad that it hadn’t occurred to me. I wondered if there was anything that could have been done for the kittens; an emergency C-section, maybe? I imagined her body going into labor, and the kittens being born and dying in a box underground. I imagined her returning to haunt our garden gate and look at us in disdain. We’d deserve it.

Last night, I considered lighting a candle where she’d fallen.

Tonight I hosed the spot down.