Pouncer, 2007-2010

We met the family who was giving her away one bright summer morning outside the Santa Cruz Petsmart, and she poked her head out of her box trying to take it all in as we shopped for those things a new kitten needs. She was black, medium-haired, the very embodiment of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Once we got her home, she ran everywhere with a bouncy, pouncy lope, making the bell on her collar jingle merrily. "Pouncer" was the only possible name for her. My then 8 year old autistic boy loved her immediately. She was to be his cat.

She went missing about six weeks later. We had been cautiously letting her outside by degrees, and we thought we could do so safely as she had always returned quickly. Even when she didn't, her bell would always tell us where she was. But one night she didn't come in. I went to work as usual, but when I got home she still wasn't in. Although I searched the neighborhood for her that night, I could hear neither her sweet little meow nor her bell. I was worried enough to take the next morning off from work to search for her in daylight, and indeed I thought I heard her meow at least once, from the neighbor's property where it met ours at a corner. I heard her, but couldn't find her, until I found the drainage pipe my neighbor had recently put in to replace an unsightly open ditch. I called in after her, and she answered. Her eyes glowed back at me when I shined a flashlight down, and once she knew it was me she meowed and meowed and meowed.

The problem was that the drainpipe was of PVC and had been laid on a slope, too steep and smooth for her to get any traction. Once her curiosity had drawn her in, there was no getting out. She scrambled furiously trying to reach me, but could make no progress. Nor could I reach her, as she was a good twenty feet down.

I tried lowering a rope to her, to give her something she could get her claws into, but it wouldn't go down by itself. My neighbor supplied a skateboard. I lowered that on the rope, and Pouncer was clever enough, or desperate enough, to clamber onto it, and I hauled her up. I still have the t-shirt she shredded as she clung to me while I walked her back to the house.

She took up some funny habits over the years. Somehow she learned to walk while keeping her bell silent, so she had a way of sneaking up on you when you least expected. Rather than laying down in certain out-of-the-way places, she loved to flop down in random spots in the middle of the floor, making a splendid speed-bump. Her favorite place was directly in front of wherever we were trying to push my older son's wheelchair, especially when we were trying to get him to his school bus. Or right behind my computer chair. I've developed the reflex of checking the floor behind me before I roll backward. Every night, my son would bring her to bed with him, usually under protest, and he'd run out of blankets for himself to make a comfortable nest for her. She'd escape as soon as he was asleep, unless she was feeling unusually cuddly. Her more usual sleeping spot was on my older son's feet, especially if he was under this one very warm blanket my mother made for him. Her happy chirrup greeted any of us when she saw us walk into whatever room she had taken for hers.

I didn't think anything of it when Pouncer seemed to be sleeping more than usual, shortly after the new year started. The days were short, and while not very cold by the standards of some places the nights were chilly for the area. But with 20/20 hindsight, the night she spent all night curled up next to my son's head should have been a warning sign.

The day after that she moved very little. That night she could barely move, and her head drooped to the floor. My wife called the vet in the morning but was unfortunately not home when the call was returned. So it wasn't until the next morning that she got taken to the vet. The diagnosis was not good: dehydrated from the vomiting and from not having drunk anything, and signs of massive liver failure consistent with poisoning. As near as anyone could figure, she may have accidentally gotten some mushroom while nibbling on grass. They're plentiful around here this time of year, and many of them are deadly.

That evening she seemed to be responding to treatment, but by this morning she was declining again. We went to the vet to see her. Her bright eyes had gone dull, and her tail was flat and lifeless. She looked at me and meowed. It was as if she was back in that drainpipe and was begging for me to lower another skateboard and pull her out of the hellhole she felt herself to be in, but this time there was nothing I could do.

Not that we didn't try. My wife took her to the large vet clinic in Santa Cruz, the one that offered emergency and intensive care, while I held out enough hope to go to work. But the more extensive tests they were able to do there showed that matters were even worse than we had thought, and there was a heart murmur besides. There was nothing more to do.

We buried her under the redwoods where she loved to explore. I stamped the clay from my shoes, washed my hands, and sat down to write this.

My younger son, now 11, keeps saying "God will make her alive again." Where he got that from I have no idea. It has been some time since I've been a Christian believer, even longer since I took him to church regularly since he can sometimes be unmanageable in that environment. Eastern Orthodox worship impinges on all the senses, and he may have found it over-stimulating. Even more, although hymns with an eschatological theme are common, they are also abstract. I don't see how he could have extracted such a plain statement of belief from them. He has never shown any other palpable sign of faith.

What that might do for mine, I can't say. But I hope he's right.

Goodbye, little Beastie-Beast.

Edit: Having taken some more time to think it over, and considering some of what the second vet found, I'm less inclined to think it was poisoning. We'd known -- and it had slipped my mind in the rush of events -- that she had a heart murmur congenitally. It's the kind of thing that isn't a problem in at least half the cats who have it, and it had been so long since we were told about it that we assumed that was the case here. But it may not have been.

Poisoning was the guess from the first vet we saw, who just had some basic lab results to work with. He operates a mobile vet clinic out of an RV, and while he knows what he's doing there are some kinds of work he cannot do, such as X-rays. The X-rays taken by the second vet showed both an enlarged heart and enlarged liver. That's not the kind of thing that happens overnight.

So it's possible that this was latent congenital problems finally catching up with her. In, again, 20/20 hindsight, what I took to be signs of maturity in her, the reduction of some of her kittenish behaviors, may have been instead the kind of loss of energy that should have been an early indication of the problem that merely came to their conclusion yesterday.

Maybe, then, we were only ever going to have her for a little while. That somehow doesn't make me feel it any less. I have no idea why this is affecting me so badly. It's not as if I haven't lost cats before. Unless, maybe, she was one of those special animals who only comes along once or twice in a lifetime. That makes her all the more precious for the short time she was with us.