To Catch a Tabby Cat

A furry orange kitten glares at me from the corner of the live animal trap. He’s clearly a toughie, with a lean body and a red scratch next to his eye, probably a scar from fighting one of the other cats that roam our neighborhood. I’m careful to keep my fingers away from him.

I call my sister immediately. “Are you at home? Because I have a kitten for Patrick!”

My sister Joanne and her husband Lamar and their seven children live some twenty miles north, on a small hobby farm in Berks County. They raise pigs, goats, heifers, rabbits, chickens, and dogs, and have a history of rescuing cats. (Once Lamar found a kitten on a lonely road during a cold winter night. The kitten was tame and had clearly been abandoned.)

“So right now we have two kittens, ” Joanne said to me a few weeks ago. “But Patrick,” she said, referring to her seven-year-old, “is disappointed because we don’t have an orange kitty. He wants an orange cat.”

“He wants an orange kitten? There’s some half-stray cats in our neighborhood, and one of them had kittens in our woodpile recently,” I tell Joanne. “Two of them are orange. Maybe you can have one of them.”

“But don’t tell Patrick,” I say. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to get one.”

Later, I go visit our next-door neighbor, Sandy. I know the mama cat’s original owner, who lived two doors down, moved away in the spring and Sandy has been feeding the stray cats along with her own. I’m not going to go cat-napping.

“You want one of the kittens?” Sandy says, after I explain what I want. “You can have all three!

“Thanks, but I just need one.”

We chat about her cats for a bit, standing on the porch of Sandy’s big Victorian house. Her most treasured cat, a beautiful Persian, dozes nearby on a wicker chair. “That one’s my boy,” says Sandy. “In the winter, he comes inside.”

Sandy tells me she thinks the kittens will be ready to leave their mother soon. “You just have to catch one.”

My next step is to go buy some cat food and start leaving food out regularly. Sure enough, the orange kittens, along with the other cats, eat the food every night.

I try to get them to come to me, but they scurry away in fear. I know I don’t have the hours needed to tame a wild kitten.

Remembering how Dad once caught a cat instead a skunk with a live animal trap (as told in this post here), I decide that’s the way to go.

“Can you help me set the live animal trap for the kitten, Dad?”

“Sure, but you might not get the right one,” says Dad.

“I know, but then I’ll just have to let the cat out and try again. I have no other way of catching this kitten, I can’t outrun it and it’ll be best if Patrick can tame it while it’s still a kitten.”

One night, we set the trap in the same place I’ve been leaving the food. The next morning, I hurry out to check the trap.

Huddled inside is an orange tabby kitten.

“I got one of the orange ones!” I yell to Mom. “On my first try! I’ll take the kitten to Joanne’s right away.” I lay down some cardboard in the back of my car, place the trap with the kitty inside on the cardboard, call my boss and explain I’ll be late to work, and drive north. The kitten is strangely quiet the whole way.

At Joanne’s house, all the children gather around as I lift the trap, which is the size of a large mailbox, out of the back of my car.

“Bring it into the barn,” says Joanne. “The boys have built a pen to keep kittens in until they know this barn is home.”

When we release the kitten into the roomy chicken wire pen, he immediately shoots around, looking for a way out.

“Well, he’s had a stressful night,” says Joanne. “We’ll leave him alone, and let him get used to his new home.”

Later that day, I text Joanne. “Is the kitten still in the pen?”

Joanne replies, “Alas, the kitty escaped sometime this morning. We have not found it. It made Patrick sad.”

She sends another text. “Thank you for trying. I feel bad for you and Patrick. But I will say that was the wildest kitten I have ever seen.”

I think sadly of Patrick. I know from experience it’s no fun to lose a pet, even if you’ve just had it for a few hours. I wonder what will happen to the kitten. Will he die in the woods or get hit crossing a road?

A week passes, then Joanne texts me again. “Patrick saw the orange kitten in the barn today so it is still around.” The next day: “The kitten ate food while the boys were watching.”

Last week, we baby-sat Patrick and some of his siblings. I ask for a kitten update.

“Well, his name is Garfield. And he lets me hold him now, when he comes for food.” Patrick says.

Later, his mom sent me some pictures, of Garfield and the other kittens. They are nearly grown into cats now. In the picture, you can see Patrick petting Garfield.

One neighborhood’s stray kitten is another neighborhood’s happy barn cat!

Patrick and his three cats. Photo credits: Joanne Snyder.