Life and Death

On Monday I encounter baby armadillos, which is a first. They're at the side of the trail, snuffling around in the undergrowth with manic energy, three of them. I've seen armadillos in the wild before, but not often. They're usually adults, and a single hasty move is all it has taken to send them scurrying away. Added up, and excluding those I see squished on the highway with depressing frequency, I've seen a total of three armadillos in the wild, and that figure has just doubled. They are each about the size of a large, well-fed guinea-pig. I walk up to them slowly and carefully, and either they don't see me or they're not bothered. I get within about three feet and stand there for the next ten minutes just watching them.

That evening, we're driving past Catman's house on Sumner. Catman is the local crazy guy who feeds feral cats. We've stopped off at his house before, and he's okay, a nice guy with not an ounce of malice or aggression anywhere in his personality; and most of what he says is lucid, even interesting, but then you get digressions into how he foresaw both the collapse of the twin towers and the death of Lady Diana Spencer - also that he died and encountered angels before being brought back to life on more than one occasion. His testimony can be exhausting, but he has kittens scampering around in his yard.

'Kittens!' I squeal.

Bess steps on the brake and backs up at speed.

We get out and go to see the kittens.

Catman remembers us but not our names. He looks and smells better than he did last time. He had painful scrapes and bruises on his arms and legs, and his hair had been cut by someone who apparently thought they were shearing a sheep. Today he's more like a skinny version of Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural. He tells us about the kittens, and it becomes obvious that the way to talk to him is to keep him on the subject of cats, because that way he makes sense and will even listen. The mother of the kittens was killed by some dog, he tells us.

There are six kittens, same litter but different fathers, black, tabby, and four Siamese - six little scampering fluffballs looking up at us with buggy blue eyes. They climb all over as, mewing away. We watch them clean themselves, even having a pee and covering it over with soil. They're tiny, but apparently just old enough for their mother to have taught them all the important stuff. They'll probably be okay. That all six of them have survived this long in some guy's garden suggests that they're tough and healthy.

Tuesday is similarly grey. The skies have been heavy and overcast of late and I find it oppressive. Coming home from HEB, I see an opossum dead at the side of the road, most likely hit by a car. Worse still, I can see movement. There are babies spilling from her cooling pouch, alive but blind and hairless with ants swarming all around. They're doomed. They won't survive outside their mother or without her warmth. They're too small. It feels like the most horrible fucking thing I think I've seen. I could take them home and they will die. I leave them and they will die. I'm paralysed. Nature can be a  cunt at times, although I suppose on this occasion she was acting through some yahoo-fucknugget in a truck. I tell myself that critters die in the wild all the time and that this is no different.

I phone my wife and she tells me we have an animal rescue organisation in the city, and that it's worth giving them a call because they'll even come out for an injured sparrow. I give her the address of where I saw the opossum and she calls them.

In the evening we go back to see Catman and the kittens. We take a bag of kitten chow and some milk, because it's clear that they can use all the help they can get. Catman's care, through no fault of his own, seems a bit erratic. One of the kittens has gone missing. They're at the age where they want only to be friends with anything that moves, and Catman thinks the missing kitten probably followed the mail guy down the street and got lost. I'm telling myself that anyone decent finding the lost kitten will be unable to resist her fuzzy charm and will either give her a good home, or make the effort to find one for her; because that's what I would do. I don't want to have to think about other possibilities.

We feed the kittens in so much as that Catman sweeps a section of his path and tips out some of the dried chow. He takes an empty tin which once contained cat food from amongst the detritus scattered across his lawn, inspects the inside for crap, then pours out some kitten milk. Flies swarm around as the kittens stuff their faces.

Wednesday begins with the same grey sky, and Bess finds Gary dead in the road outside. Bess and I are devastated. I spend most of the day in either a daze or tears, and then I write this on facebook:

Gary wasn't really our cat, but he ended up living in our yard on a more or less permanent basis because his owner was an arsehole who probably didn't feed him properly, and never really seemed to give a shit about the endless succession of critters she has running around her yard for a couple of months before slouching off to die in traffic. Her name for him was Fat Cat, which probably tells you all you need to know. I renamed him Gary because Fat Cat seemed cruel, and because he reminded me of Gary, my neighbour in London - big, pushy, not very bright, always there hanging around when you open the back door, but essentially lovable. I fed him every day, left dry food out for him and the others, and yet he'd still run into the house at every opportunity, meowing his head off and burying his face in the food bowl. We usually let him eat for a few minutes, then would pick him up to take him back out. He purred like a motorbike as soon as he was picked up. He just liked the attention. The other cats eventually got used to him. He chased a few of them off every once in a while, but fights were few and far between. Once we took him for a day out, to spend time with Bess's grandmother, reasoning that it would do them both good and that he was uncomplicated and outgoing (and that she might even want to keep him), but he spent the entire time under the bed, just waiting for whatever it was to be over. This also put the dampers on a very vague plan we had of driving him up to Tennessee and giving him to my friend Sarah who was at the time looking for a large hairy cat. Anyway, today Bess found him in the road outside, presumably hit by a car. I didn't realise I would be quite so upset, but I guess he lived to a good age and at least his last few years were happy.

I dig a hole at the end of the garden. Bess comes home around lunchtime and we bury Gary. My heart is breaking.

That evening she comes home with Catman's kittens, all five of them bundled up and blinking in her arms as she gets from the car. 'I couldn't stand to think of anything else happening to them.'

'I know,' I say.

'After the one went missing and then Gary, and the opossum you saw - I can't take any more dead critters this week.'

'Me neither. I went past and the opossum was still there. I guess those rescue people didn't think it was worth their effort.'

Bess sighs. 'I had my doubts. I called them a few years ago, that time we had a ringtail in the yard. It took them two hours to turn up.'

The kittens spend most of the day asleep in a little fluffy huddle in an old crib we have under the bed, with occasional bursts of activity and following anything that moves, including the other cats. We already have eight, so we won't be able to keep them, but we can at least give them a decent start in life.

It feels like the storm has broken.