To Die Alone, Without A Name

A brief note on an opportunity missed

The original sin was not mine. A former neighbor fancied herself a cat breeder, or at least someone who liked giving away cats. The ones she couldn’t sell or transfer were released into the wild. The construction dumpster next to our home as it was built also sheltered kittens who cried and scattered as plywood debris clattered drumlike against metal walls. There were mewing noises deep in the lush fescue that grew beneath the old goat runs.

We set out food and they came, hesitant and feral, part of a growing feline community. I named them as I came to know them. There was Momma Kitty, four litters to our knowledge and counting. VP Mouse Ops, her gorgeous grey and white daughter who soon had kittens of her own. Fluffers, the massive long-haired alpha male tabby who effortlessly dominated the group. Heckler and Koch, cats from Momma’s first generation who survived the winter but in Heckler’s case lost ears and most of a tail in the process.

Momma Kitty brought five kittens into the barn one evening. We socialized them, gave them real names, took them to the vet, let them come and go from the house. They earn their keep with prompt dismemberments of field mice, chipmunks, frogs, birds. The barn remains quiet and tidy under their stewardship. VP Mouse Ops had a litter at the same time. Three of them survived and joined our Gang of Five at a reserved distance, eating meals together and occasionally stepping across the threshold of the house but never allowing us to get near.

The challenge is to get them all trapped and spayed and released. It can’t be done. There will still be breeding pairs out there. If not on my property, then nearby. The kittens, like the spice, must flow.

At the same time, there’s murder in the shadows of my forested acres. Coyotes with mirror-bright eyes, appearing briefly in single frames of a security camera. They prey on the weak and slow, but also on the bold. Heckler stopped coming for meals in the middle of the summer; his brother Koch became hard to find for a while before showing up to challenge and chatter with the younger cats one evanescent late evening. Two months ago, the majestic and handsome Fluffers, a tomcat of unrivaled potency and near-bobcat size, also disappeared.

Last week, I was cleaning outside the barn when I noticed that the driver’s side window on my old VW Fox was down. When I approached the car, VP Mouse Ops appeared inside the cabin and started running around frantically, bashing her head against the windshield and rear window in an attempt to escape. I stumbled hastily to the far side of the Volkwagen, opened a door, and she was gone.

Two hours later, I heard plaintive mewing from inside the Fox.

Two tuxedo tabbies and a black kitten. I took a few photographs and held the two that I could get out from under the VW’s dashboard. Then I heard VP Mouse Ops mewing for them. I stood back, around the corner, and watched her collect the group before disappearing under the fence towards a neighbor’s property.

Afterwards, I chided myself for not taking possession of the three kittens and feeding them myself until they were ready for neutering. But their eyes were still blue. They needed their mother. The biggest concern was that I wouldn’t see them again until they were too old to be socialized, which meant they would be infinitely harder to catch and take to the vet.

This past Saturday was rainy and cold at Mid-Ohio. It was a real anti-climax. We’d spent eye-watering amounts of time and money to get the SR8 ready for an attempt at a really newsworthy laptime and an overall win or two, but I couldn’t get rain tires for the car ahead of time so I switched my registration to the small car. My Radical PR6 seemed to have no front grip at all, particularly under braking. It’s an evil feeling to do 130mph across glassy standing water in a 950-pound sports racer with no crash structure. Best I could do was fifth of twelve, the bottom three of which had either declined to compete or come in after the pace lap.

After the race, my crew chief pulled me aside and told me that he’d struck and killed VP Mouse Ops before sunrise, on the way to the track. I was surprised it had taken this long. She liked to hunt in the corn fields down the street and I frequently saw her in harm’s way. There was nothing that could be done for her. But she had three kittens who were not beyond saving, if they could be found.

I texted my neighbor, who clearly didn’t care. People out here aren’t sentimental about animals. The computing world likes to talk about “pets and cattle” — pets have a name and are cherished, cattle have a number and are harvested. Out here there’s not much of the former attitude.

The crew took flashlights and went out into the field, looking and listening. But the kittens were silent. On Sunday I walked the fence and listened for the rustle of paws or the mournful mewing of hungry babies. They were old enough to travel on their own, so I scanned the field for motion. There was nothing.

Surely they are gone now. The two that I held in my hands, that I could have taken away. And their sibling. Objectively, it’s good news. VP-MO would have been hard to trap and spay. The kittens would have been difficult to keep alive, had I removed them at the time, and feral, had I waited. These deaths close a branch of the Malthusian tree, so I can focus on the others. This little farm and I can support maybe 15-20 cats total. That’s more than enough to make sure that I never lose a wiring harness or have a repeat of the Dead Mouse In The Mouth Incident… come to think of it, I should tell that story here sometime. Not now.

15-20 is enough, and that’s what I have, give or take. Now it’s a battle to keep the numbers down.

It’s ridiculous and pathetic of me to worry so much about three newborn cats. We live in this world where human blood is shed without remorse for the slightest of reasons and yet it’s not enough to satisfy the lust of the chattering classes, who yearn for more pointless mayhem in the Middle East, in Europe, in what we used to call Formosa. You open up Reddit or even Instagram and people are positively frantic for violence to be done against those who disagree with them. I wonder how many of those people have done serious harm to another man, or even to an animal. Not as easy as they think. Still. If people started dying en masse at the “peaceful protests”, would that dampen their numbers, or would millions of us run joyfully into the fray, relieved somehow that the gloves were finally off?

“I prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around.”

A decade ago, I wrote about small souls. How they are worth less, somehow. We all understand this on a subconscious level. The death of three children on my local school-bus route would be a heartbreaking tragedy. The loss of three kittens? Not even close. They had small souls. Even compared to the Fab Five of ex-kittens who make tiger-striped piles in my Eames lounger or come running from the back acres when dinner is called. I never got to know them. There was hardly anything to know.

And yet I don’t want them to die without names.

So tonight, after the work is done and the cats are fed and the barn is closed, I will sit down and think of three. One name for each kitten. It makes them real, somehow. So they can join Fluffers and Heckler and the others who don’t come for dinner any more. In Heaven, or oblivion. Either way, I know I will see them again.