How we got the Charlie

Here is what I think happened.

Late in 2018, someone's pet cat had a litter of kittens. I suspect they were unexpected, but initially welcomed by Mama Cat's human family because honestly, who doesn't love cute little kittens?

Time passed. The kittens' eyes opened. They explored their small world, began to play and tussle. Slowly they were weaned off Mama's milk and began to eat solid food. They were even cuter than they'd been as helpless newborns. And they were loved.

More time passed. The kittens became more independent. They started to range further, play harder. They grew larger, reaching sexual maturity. The females went into heat. And, crucially, the males began to spray stinky urine to mark their territory.

And suddenly they weren't quite as lovable as they'd been as tiny kittens.

Or perhaps it was something more dire. Perhaps Mama Cat's human family didn't have enough money to feed them all. Maybe they'd lost their jobs or were moving out of state. Whatever it was, the humans decided the litter had to go.

I picture them all being bundled into the car during the summer of 2019. Driven some distance away from where they lived, probably at night. And then, close to a city park, they were dumped out of the car and the humans sped off, leaving the teenage cats to fend for themselves in a huge, strange, unfriendly world.

Some of them, no doubt, promptly became snacks for the coyotes who lived in that neighborhood. Some may have died of exposure. Others were likely run over by cars when they tried crossing a busy street. But at least one survived by staying hidden during the day, catching small prey or scavenging in human garbage to fill his hungry belly.

This one, a brown mackerel tabby boy with white ruff and paws, was good at catching mice and rats and ate whatever else he could find. He was always hungry. He itched constantly from fleas, and he stunk because he never had the time or space to give himself a proper bath. He was miserable. But he was alive.

Then one evening as the dusk and cold came on, he found a cardboard box with a hole cut in the side, under the eaves of a human house. There was a cozy shirt inside the box. Maybe it felt enough like his old home to be comforting. He slept there for the night and disappeared again during the day, his survival instincts kicking in as soon as the sky began to lighten.

He returned to sleep in the box for two nights, and on the third night there was another, stranger box placed nearby, this one made not of cardboard, but some kind of tough fabric and hard steel wire. Inside the box was the delicious scent of little silver fish in oil. The tabby boy was always hungry and the fish smelled so good that he forgot to be cautious. And when he entered, the box snapped shut behind him.

The tabby boy panicked. His time on the street had made him scrawny but muscular, and he fought with all his might to get out of the trap. Including dragging the fabric cover into the trap with him and gnawing several holes in it. But the trap held. And in the morning the people in the human house, who had been looking for their own missing cat for over a month, found him there.

They scanned him for a microchip. They looked for a collar. They put up signs all around the neighborhood, at the cat rescues and shelters, and at the vet's office indicating they'd found a cat. They fed him, combed all the fleas out of his coat, cleaned him up, had him altered, and took care of all the vaccines and other preventive medicines pets are supposed to receive. No one ever came forward to claim him.

And so Mama Cat's human family never found out that the 10-month-old male cat they dumped by the side of the road in 2019 would grow up to be the best, sweetest Charlie-cat ever.

Their loss.

It's our handsome Charlie boy, all grown up!