Lovely Luna

We were on the way to the supermarket chattering about the price of groceries when my phone rang. It had been a long day at work, and I considered just letting it go to voicemail. I sighed as it buzzed away in my pocket, but when I glanced at who was calling my curiosity was piqued. It was friend and fellow feline foster parent Melissa. I’d been keeping up with her water-loving, toilet-trained, leash-walking tabby cat Tobias online, and I was looking forward to an update, so I answered. 

Melissa always talks fast, but this seemed a little different—she sounded upset. She told us that there was a cat trapped in a drainage culvert under a busy road. She said it was crying loudly as if it was injured, and she didn’t know who else to call. I didn’t know how much use I would be, but I offered to stop by and see if I could help or at least keep her company until Animal Control arrived. 

Fortunately, we were just driving past the parking lot where the cat was trapped when we hung up. I told my boyfriend to pull over, and he didn’t even ask why. I’m sure he knew it had to be some crazy animal-related mission, and I’m sure he also didn’t mind the respite from grocery shopping—anything to delay that. 

Melissa was standing in the parking lot, flagging us down as we drove up. There was another woman hovering on her hands and knees next to a drainage culvert in the sidewalk calling “here kitty, kitty, kitty,  here kitty, kitty” into the echoey blackness. It was dark enough outside that it had just started to cool off, and we could hear the cat’s shrill cries careening up through the concrete to answer her. 

We walked over to the culvert and peered in, but all we could see was humid, velvety darkness. The tiny wails seemed so much louder from down there. We needed to be able to see. I got the tire iron out of the back of my car, and Taylor helped me pry the manhole over the culvert open. With our flashlights on, we scrutinized the inside of the culvert. The drain opened into two tunnels. One arched up and crossed under the length of the parking lot, and the other veered across the street where it met another manhole on the other side. Based on the sound of her cries, we figured that the distressed cat was somewhere under the middle of the road. We were thankful, because if she was under the parking lot, we would never had gotten to her. 

“Do you think she’s hurt? Maybe she has kittens down there or something and can’t get back up.” Melissa asked me. I told her it sounded more like a kitten and that a grown cat would have no trouble getting out of the drain. It was only a few foot drop from the surface. And the meows were so tiny and frail. It had to be a kitten. A soaking wet, terrified kitten. 

While we opened the drain up, the woman who’d been helping Melissa had gone and bought a fried chicken patty which we tore up and threw into the drain, hoping it would lure the kitten closer. Melissa lowered herself into the manhole and peered into the tunnel. “It’s a kitten!” she shouted up to us. 

“Just one?” I asked.

She nodded. “Probably only a few weeks old.” 

Animal Control pulled up just as I was wondering how a tiny baby kitten had made it to the mall and managed to find its way into a very noisy and damp drainage ditch under a busy road. When I asked Renee, the animal control officer, she said the kitten probably hitched a ride in a car motor and then was so traumatized once they got to the parking lot that she ran into the nearest hiding place, only to find thats he couldn’t get back out of it. Who knows how long she’d been trapped in there. Now we just had to figure out how to get her out. 

Because no one had a better idea, Melissa decided to go in after the kitten. The chicken wasn’t luring her any closer. She laid down flat on her belly and inched her way into the stuffy, damp tunnel that was barely the width of her shoulders. Taylor and I waited at the manhole on the other side of the road just in case the kitten tried to run away from Melissa. We were terrified she would run into one of the forks of the tunnel that ran a long way without any breaks. Then we would lose her for good. I was terrified either Melissa or the kitten would be kitten by a spider or a snake down there in the dark, but Melissa was fearless. She inched into the tunnel on her elbows, her shoulders hunched together and head leaned down to fit into the tiny passage. I could hear her beckoning softly to the kitten, and the kitten screaming back at her to stay away. When she was about twenty feet into the tunnel, she decided it was useless. The kitten was staying just out of arms reach, and she was running out of air. It was muggy and hot in the tunnel, and she didn’t want to hyperventilate. So, she came back out, covered in muddy drain water. 

We were all a little dispirited. We tried for a long time to lure her out or frighten her out. Anything we could do to get her safely out of the drain. We were completely out of ideas by the time the fire department showed up. Three firemen strolled over to assess the situation and without hesitating, strapped on their helmets and gear and dropped into the manhole. Another good Samaritan who’s stopped by to help crouched in the manhole on the other side with a large net over the tunnel’s opening. As emergency backup, I hung above the manhole just behind him with the cat tongs in case the kitten somehow slipped by him. When we were all in place, they turned the hose on. We heard the kitten yelp and slap her paws against the concrete running for the other side. It took a few pumps of the hose to push her all the way to our end, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when the man held his hand up out of the manhole with one angry, biting, clawing, ferocious kitten clasped in it. Melissa was waiting with a towel, and she wrapped the kitten up snugly and cooed sweet words at him while the man and the firemen clambered up out of their respective holes and walked over to see the little creature that had caused so much chaos. 

 

She couldn’t have been more than four weeks old—a little skeleton of a kitten with luminous white fur. And, oddity of oddities, she had seven little toes on each paw, each with its own claw and paw pad. It looked like she was wearing giant mittens on her tiny stick legs. Despite the muggy, hot night, she was shivering with cold and terror. You could see the fear in her giant, shiny green eyes. She tolerated us holding her only for the warmth that the towel and our bodies provided.

“We should call her Luna,” the guy who’d pulled her out of the culvert said, and so she had a name. And a new life.  

We held her for a long time and talked and laughed, thankful that she was healthy and alive. Her gums were a little pale and her skin tented at the nape of her neck when pinched, so we drove her home with us and gave her fluids and a big can of food (which she devoured). The whole time she ate, she growled and hissed at no one in particular. She buried her whole face in her food, and when she looked up to yell at us for being so close, little food droplets were hanging from her whiskers and eyelashes. We laughed at her antics and wrapped her back in a fresh out of the dryer warm towel. We wiped the food off of her face with a damp cloth and settled in for the night. She slept and screamed in turns for the first few nights. And she ate viciously and relentlessly for what seemed like days. Her lean belly grew rounder, and she started approaching us on her own. She would dig all fourteen of the little front claws into our feet when she was hungry—which was constantly. She knew we were the bearers of food. And that’s how she learned to trust us. 

 

She loved lounging in the window in the warm shafts of sunlight, and she was so small and white that you could almost see though her. We watched her lying there sometimes and marveled that she was alive, watching the tiny slats of her ribs rising and falling above her growing belly. She was so young and frail when we found her, and it was amazing to watch her get bigger and stronger and braver. She used to cower behind the couch all day and peep her head out only to dart to the litterbox or the food bowl. Now, Luna is a charismatic, fearless little feline. You can barely tell she is the same cat. That’s the miracle that any foster home can accomplish. With just the smallest investment of time, effort, and love, anyone can make a huge difference in an animal’s life. If all of those amazing people hadn’t come together to rescue one sad, scared little cat, she wouldn’t be alive right now. 

While none of us can change the world on our own, we can change the world for one animal anytime we want to.  

Luna is currently still in foster. She will be available for adoption at Southern Pines Animal Shelter as soon as she is big enough for surgery. However, there are always animals at Southern Pines in need of temporary foster homes. They might be too small, to sick, or too scared for surgery—but all they need is a little time and love. For them, it might be the difference between a lonely kennel and a happy home or even between life and death.