It was a long drive home from our honeymoon. With our heads spinning from the whirlwind week we just finished and thoughts of returning to our otherwise hum-drum lives creeping into our consciousness, I wasn't sure what I really heard when, as I watched my new husband fumble to unlock the front door in the midnight darkness, a feeble cry came from the neighbor's bushes. After a few minutes, though, I knew it was a cat cry. I owned three of my own beautiful felines and, though I didn't recognize this particular voice, I knew it was crying for help. I desperately wanted to help it, but finding it in the dark, in someone else's bushes, with my husband begging me to just get in the house made it nearly impossible to make a solid attempt at locating the mournful meow.
As soon as dawn hit, however, I popped out of bed and ran to the front door. Still in my robe and slippers, I flung the door open and ran to poke around in my neighbors landscaping, surely looking like some crazed lunatic to anybody unlucky enough to see me. A much softer meow was coming from somewhere, but I couldn't find it.
"What are you doing, honey?" my husband asked, still sounding sleepy.
"Trying to find the cat." I simply stated.
"Why? We have three of our own. We can't take care of another one and you know it." He had a point.
"I know, but it sounded like it was suffering and you know you wouldn't want one of our cats suffering if someone could help them, would you?"
"Alright," he said gruffly, defeated by my reminder of his love for his own pets, "but we can't keep it." With that, he was in the bushes with me, searching for the source of the faint cry for help.
"Found it!" he said joyously. "Oh, honey, maybe you should go in the house." Sadness clouded his voice.
"Why?" I came around to where he was bent over and saw the little bitty thing, huddled the way cats do it the cold, with its feet carefully tucked underneath it. It was grey tiger-striped, no more than a couple of months old, with dirt and twigs stuck to its fur, crusty eyes and the saddest little meow anyone has ever heard. I scooped it up immediately trying to console it, but it kept crying.
"What are you doing?" my husband asked. "It could have any number of diseases! We can't expose our cats to that."
I wasn't listening anymore at this point. I was going to find a large box, get it some food and water, clean it up and it could be an outdoor cat until the vet had a chance to check it out. But I wasn't going to let it sit there and suffer anymore. Not when I could do something for it.
And then it happened. The small, starved, fuzzy body I was carrying in my arms thrashed around violently. The sweet little voice turned to a strianed, stuttering, painful cough. I stopped in my tracks, felt my heart pound in my chest and an involuntary tear start to form in the corner of my eye. It only took a few seconds, but the seizure this little guy was having seemed like it took hours.
I set the cat down, heeding my husband's warning to not expose my cats to whatever this kitten had, tore through the house to our still-unpacked honeymoon luggage, threw on the first thing I could find, grabbed an empty box, a towel, car keys and my purse and ran for the door. My husband was close behind me, sensing what I was doing and not having the heart to argue with his tearful wife.
The news was not good. The vet suspected someone had poisoned the animal. He said something about antifreeze and that there was nothing he could do. I cried at watching this poor little animal switch from being lucid and scared to writhing around violently with empty eyes. I handed the vet my wallet and told him to do whatever he thought was best. I told him we were just about broke, having spent all our money on a wedding, but I didn't care. My husband hung his head in mourning. Thankfully, the vet refused any attempt at payment, handed me a tissue and said he would take care of the kitten. My husband ushered me to our car, hugged me gently and quietly let me pull myself together on the drive home.
Though we couldn't save the kitten in the bushes, I did have an action plan. The vet led me to believe that someone purposefully poisoned this cat or had antifreeze sitting out unattended. That meant one of my neighbors needed an education and I was going to give it to them. Over the next week, I knocked on doors, told the kitten's sad story and made sure all of my nearest neighbors checked their garages for open antifreeze containers. To my knoweldge, there has not been another instance of poisoned felines near my house in the past three years. Hopefully, this was a horrible accident. And if it wasn't I can only hope that my husband and I scared the villian enough to stop whatever he thought he was doing with a poor innocent life that was ended much too soon.