Yesterday, I had to take Glory to the vets. Since Mike has been in the hospital, she isn’t herself. She will run to the food bowls during feeding time, but she won’t eat. She has been to vet more than any cat here, simply because she is one of Mike’s cats and he only has two. I do not want anything to happen to her while he is gone. They never find anything wrong with her. Nothing that sticks out anyway. But when I look at her, I get the most unsettling of feelings. She has this bulge on her side. It’s not the typical spay sway that some females get. It is larger on her right side then her left.  the vet said it is just excess fat. She is drinking a lot of water, but she is also doing a great deal of coughing for minutes at a time and she isn’t showing any other signs of URI. So for my peace my mind, I took her in yet again.They took a film and said everything checks out. Lungs are clear, she has stool in her she hasn’t passed yet, no gas showing up- only a bit of arthritis in her lower back.

Since she is constipated, they gave her a kitty enema (no results) but everything else has checked out to my vet’s satisfaction. I was given appetite stimulants for her which worked and she is eating again. She just doesn’t look right and she is sleeping a lot.

My hope is she is just depressed because Mike isn’t here. But I just can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. On my way out, one of the techs came up to me and handed me a bag. It was a plain white bag with handles and it was heavy. I didn’t need to look inside to know that Brandi had come home again.

She had so many places she loved to run. I thought about  her most of the night, and prayed in the morning and then drove up to the mountains to the Cascade Lumber Co. trails. We used to go there early in the morning and I would unleash her and watch her just play in the forest and race down the trails, disappearing at times into the bush until I would call her back to me. We haven’t been up there in months because her running days were falling far behind her. It was all she could do to make it down the ramp in the mornings to do her business. It is fairly isolated up there.

I took the urn and started walking up the hill. Finding a nice green knoll, I bent down and poured Brandi into the forest telling her that now she is truly free. I felt at the time that the Cascade Trails was appropriate to release her, because tears were certainly  cascading down my face.

On the drive back, I always  pass a storage yard for heavy equipment and recreational vehicles. I have never seen anyone in there, but this time I noticed a motor home with full hookups running parked on the lot. So someone was there now probably watching over the equipment so it doesn’t get stolen. That’s when I saw movement in the field within the fence. I stopped my truck and I looked and all of a sudden breaking through the grasses come dozens of kittens! Leaping and playing and running but zoned in on that motor home and at that time of morning, my guess is they were saying “Feed me!”

Sure enough, this man comes shuffling out of the motor home with a dry cat food bag and he pours the kibble all over the ground. The kitties just scarfing it all down. I counted 18 kittens and saw two older adult cats wandering towards the food. The kittens bore an unhealthy resemblance to each other which means inbreeding is going on.

I hollered at the guy and he came over to the fence. I asked him what the story was on all these kittens and he told me that people come up to the forest and dump their cats. Ultimately, because he loves cats and puts food out when he can, they end up at his door.

As the fates would have it, I had picked up a food donation a few days ago and it was still loaded in my truck. This man looked like he didn’t have two matches to rub together and so I asked him how hard was it for him financially to provide for all these hungry babies. He told me “They eat before we do.” He gave me permission once he found out that I too love cats to drive into the yard.

I was there for about an hour just watching the kittens. Each one broke my heart. There is a little long-haired maine coon girl who is limping. Wes (that’s the man’s name)said she had gotten caught in a fence. They look to be around 2 months old and Wes and his wife have set up boxes and other cat beds in the area so they get a bit out of the weather. One cow kitty, a girl shows signs of surviving distemper. Her head tilts to the left and at times, she will stop what she is doing and do continuous circles to the right. Wes asked me what I thought this was all about and I told him she either got hit by a car and suffered brain damage or she’s a survivor of distemper. I gave the couple some dry cat food to help ease their burden a bit.

I told Wes I would help them as much as I was able to. We are going to go over and trap and neuter these kittens as soon as possible. For this colony- they are safe where they are at so anything that I do with them will be there in the yard and not in one of my enclosures as far as the group goes. But the ones that are so ill- I saw conjunctivitis, URI infections, the tomcat has a wound on his leg. Those I will bring in and vet and work with and find them homes, especially the little cow kitty I call twirl because she circles.

As I often say in this blog , God is always in the Details. I had been doing some calling to other rescues out of our county and sharing the story about the black cat colony. I found a woman  in Bend who said she would be willing to take the colony. Bend is about 3 hours from us. Normally, this time of year, the pass isn’t accessible unless you have chains, but our winter is light this year. She is coming over this weekend with volunteers to help her. Like me, she is a private rescuer and happens to have a passion for black kitties.

So I see Brandi sitting back watching all this unfold. She used to bring me hurt or ill kittens on our walks. And now today, her final act, during her last walk with me was to bring me the awareness of all the kittens near her old stomping grounds. Not only do the kittens need assistance, but the two humans who are feeding them need our help as well. This is indeed Brandi’s final act.