feral cat

as i worked in the backyard tonight, cutting up the tree we started killing yesterday, a cat snuck into the house thru the open back door. but not just any cat. of the 6 who show up on our deck every morning, 2 of the females are pregnant; and this was one of them.

we didn't even know it had gotten in until the girls and hege, who were getting ready for bed by reading a book upstairs, heard it crying. so we started a methodical search, quickly found it in the basement, and then chased it around for almost an hour.

evenutally we convinced ourselves that the terrorfied cat must have bolted out the open back door when we weren't looking, because we'd looked everywhere and had heard nothing for almost another hour. so we went to bed.

12:30 - awoke to animal sounds somewhere near our bed.

primative defense/kill instinct kicked in. i jumped up and closed the kids door, bravely sacrificing ourselves in order to save their lives. and we immediately locate the cat, sitting in the middle of the kitchen, wailing or whatever. making feral cat slam poetry.

it sees me seeing it, and off it runs back down to the basement. we're wide awake now. like hunters.

you have to understand the amount of stuff in my basement. building supplies/wood to rebuild the entire damn house. power tools, a home office, and a decade of accumulated boxes. kids clothes, records, a 40 gallon hefty bag full of 8 track tapes i found years ago, an 8 track tape player i found recently, a male torso manaquin, etc. a pregnant feral cat.

there are two elevated platforms in the basement; one is a stair landing, and the other is currentlysort of a home office. mass Stuff is crammed underneath both of these in an attempt to make the main volume of the space navigatable. the cat was, most probably, under one of these.

first we started climbing under the office (about 4' clearance without the boxes), and after about 15 minutes with me beating every surface wildly with a toy plastic tennis racket and hege conducting probes with a level, we flushed the thing and it ran out. i managed to whack it (lightly, even lovingly) with the racket as it went by just because i could think of nothing else to do. it bolted directly across the basement to the stair landing and dove under. so we spent another 15 minutes carefully moving all the sheetrock and wood stacked up against this platform and barricading the office platform. we opened the backdoor, and i lowered myself in like a tunnel rat.

we started probing again under the landing, which has a 30" clearance and is full of paint cans, sacks of quickcrete, 2 air conditioners, re-mesh, and those paper tubes used as forms for concrete footings. the cat was inside one of the tubes, which was itself inside a big roll of re-mesh. we carefully excavated everything from around it and i crawled back with an old plastic shower curtain (that we were saving?) to shove in the back end of the tube and trap the cat. hege stationed herself at the front.

and it worked. and we carefully pulled the whole thing out and walked it to the backyard for the release. i was like Marlon Perkins except in my boxer shorts in the middle of the night in my backyard in brooklyn with a tube stuffed with a blue plastic shower curtain, and everybody covered in basement spelunking grime. now i'm wide awake.

context shot

this is the feral cat spider hole