My granddaughter Shannon has arrived at the age (20 months) where she knows what feels right… and what doesn’t. She asks for pear slices, devours them hungrily, and then looks in distress at her sticky hands, which she raises up to me anxiously. “HENS!” she cries. “HENS!” Then I take a moist dishrag, wipe off her “hens,” and all is right again with the world.
I wish it were that easy with some of my ferals.
Prince Harry (so named for his strawberry mane) has lived for 3-4 years now at the Stone Pine ravine – a pretty rough place that has “disappeared” so many cats that I’ve loved. He is a darling boy – chatty and boisterous, and it took a few years but he’s now affectionate as well, greeting me every day with purring, rubbing and rolling on the ground.
I have written previously about the challenges of sheltering him near his feeding area, which is an ongoing source of frustration. (The city adamantly refuses to allow a shelter because of the sensitive habitat, which I salute… except that the homeless use the creek area for a latrine every day.) So Harry is literally left out in the cold.
Every day I feed Eddie behind the Post Office, where he can dash into a manufactured shelter anytime, and that feels right to me. And I go to the farm where I feed 5-7 hungry cats, and they come running out of the barn, and THAT feels very right to me. But then I go to Stone Pine on a rainy day, and there is Harry, his fluffy coat slicked with rain, up in the tree. (Yes, he has found a spot that is at least a little bit sheltered in a box hedge.) And it all feels completely, totally wrong. So wrong that I sometimes choke with tears.
It’s been a bully of a winter – with record rainfall, snow on our lower peaks and incessant cold. But Harry continues to bring his happy-boy routine every day when I arrive. His spirit is an amazing thing, even if it falters in the cold sometimes. It’s been enough to make me start thinking maybe I should relocate Harry; maybe there’s a better place for him somewhere. I hesitate when remembering the one time he was confined a few years ago. He spent a month of rehab time at my friend Caitlin’s indoor enclosure after being badly mauled by a predator, and although he was sweet in the beginning, as soon as he started feeling better physically, Harry got pissed, and was soon hissing and swatting at his caretaker. We reluctantly put him back by the parking lot, where he has remained mostly happy since.
Then we were approached by someone wanting a barn cat, to replace one who had recently died. My heart leapt up – could this be the break Harry needed? I envisioned a big, warm barn – the likes of which I spent time in during childhood – with an enclosed tack room they could enclose him in while he got his bearings. I asked to visit the barn, but it was really more of a stable with corrals – very small inside (really, more like a shed) and the tack room could not be closed to the outside, so Harry would have to spend weeks in a dog crate, with horse noses just a foot or two away. Envisioning my freedom-loving boy in such surroundings made me feel like Shannon with sticky hands: it just felt wrong. So I thanked her for her kind offer, and went home to feed Harry an early-evening dinner.
“Sorry, Harry,” I told him. “But I think you would have hated it.”
So the search goes on for a place for my princely boy. But I’m grateful to have done this enough years now to know what feels right and what feels wrong.
And Prince Harry is grateful, too!