Kitty 2

I am participating in NANOWRIMO this year. I will attempt to post my daily ramblings in the hopes that eventually it will become a book which will entertain you as well as myself…

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Kitty Part 2

By Plot Roach

The sun high overhead, the shadows pooled beneath their empty bellies. They searched for scraps in the abandoned junkyard. A leaf fluttered by on the wind and the pups gave chase. Even though it was not food, it provided a moment of entertainment where the dogs forgot their hunger and gave into their instinct of the hunt. A brief game of grab the leaf ensued, the dominate male of the group in possession of the cast off leaf as the others chased him. A shadow fell upon them and the alpha soon dropped his prize in order to run for shelter, as did his sisters and brothers.

“There’s six of them back here.” A man said over his walkie talkie. “What should we do about them?”

“Bring in the traps.” A voiced squawked in answer.

The shadow left, but the puppies did not resume their game, having learned from their mother that humans were not to be trusted. They could wait for hours in their hiding space beneath an old bare hulk of a car where they had first gained their eyesight and later, their legs.

The man who had approached them stood nearby, taking out a bit of food from a pocket in his overalls and tempting the puppies with tidbits and kissing noises. But these were no tame pups, and they held their ground.

By early dusk, the men came into the yard with metal mesh boxes and set them near the car. Then, with a sound of a can opening, the most delicious smell wafted through the junkyard and set the puppies to begging.
Smells the likes they had never before encountered melted the resolve of the little creatures. One by one they entered the wire boxes to gorge on the feast laid out before them. And one by one the doors snapped shut, trapping them inside.

Piteous yaps and snarls issued from the wire traps as the puppies found themselves unable to flee when the men returned in the morning to claim their prize. Five traps took away her brothers and sisters. Five traps took away all she had left of her family.

“Think these are the pups from the bitch we trapped two days ago?” One of the men asked, loading up a cage with the Alpha pup, who snarled and bit at the wire.

“I hope so.” The other man said, wiping sweat from his brow with a worn red bandana. “I’d hate to think that there’s more than one out here dropping off litters she isn’t able to feed.”

“Wasn’t there one more pup?”

“I think so.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’ll empty this lot back at the shelter and then reset the trap tonight.”

The men drove away, vowing to come back before the day could turn into dusk once again. They would set another trap, and catch another abandoned and wild dog, but they never caught the last pup, for she moved on to another, safer place, having lost the only thing that had tied her to this place.

The dog who thought of herself as “Kitty” kicked in her sleep, the hard packed earth beneath her catching the claws of her feet as she ran in her sleep. She remembered the first run, her journey from First Home. She had many homes since that old junkyard, but none had felt as safe and as comforting as when she had been in that place, surrounded by kin.

She whimpered and woke herself from her nightmare. She bared her teeth at the men who took away her family in wire cages, though she could not have known now (or even then) that they had done it to keep the pups from starving to death. The moon was high overhead and illuminated the street just outside the door of her home. She continued to growl, though thoughts of the men dissipated from her mind like dew drops from the grass on a summer morning. Though it was night, the heat of the day had been stored up in the bricks of the building and in the black pavement of the street. The unbearable heat brought her back to her present reality, her growling stomach setting her to her task. She yawned and strode out into the night, the moonlight highlighting her fur in a false silver that made her look more fox than dog.

She loped at a steady pace through the streets, pausing in front of a house to drink water from the sprinklers that came on every night at this time to water the front lawn. She sniffed the wind and headed westward toward the smell of Chinese food and Barbeque. Another growl escaped her, but this one issued from her belly. She was a shadow against the stillness of the night, only her paw pads betrayed her movement.

“MINE MINE MINE!” barked a dog from a neighboring yard. He had seen her approach and alerted his people, as was the code among dogs.

Protect your pack.

Protect you home.

Chase the invader away.

Kitty had no such loyalties that bound her and paused at the gate to study this loyal, yet annoying, creature.
“MINE MINE MINE!” He continued to bark, building up a lather along his jaws and pulling against the chain which tied him to a tree. “YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE!”

“Of course I do not belong here.” she said. “I am wandering past, as I do every night at this time. I never cross onto your land or take from you and your pack, why must you always yell at me so?” she asked.

“MINE MINE MINE!” was all he would say. Followed by “GO GO GO.” as she wandered off in search f the smells which tempted her.

A few blocks away she waited in the shadows and watched as the kitchen staff from the nearby restaurants unloaded heavy vats of garbage into dumpsters. They were young men, and as such often did their job hurriedly and without grace. She watched as food splashed onto the flagstones and waited until the boys returned to their buildings before venturing near to eat her dinner.

“Whaststhat?” said a voice in the darkness, sneezing as it paused along the edge of the streetlight to wash his whiskered face.

Kitty growled softly. “This is my food, my right to eat first.”

The whisker washer looked away as if uninterested in Kitty’s meal. “Whatever…”

Kitty ate until she was stuffed, laying down near the pile of refuse to keep the raccoon at bay.

“Comeon comeon.” he whispered as it groomed itself. Impatient, he made a dash at the food on the ground before Kitty jumped to her feet and snarled, sending him back into the shadows.

Her game startled the occupants of the building, who came out to look at the commotion. The boy who had come out recently to throw away food recognized her at once and tossed a few more bits of meat at her.
She was now hiding in the shadows. The raccoon had moved on to another dumpster in search of food, so Kitty took up his spot in the nearby shrubbery that framed the dumpster and hid it from the view of human patrons.

“What was that?” asked one of them men who had been washing dishes in the kitchen asked.

“Just a dog.” the trash boy answered, tossing the last of the food into the bottom of the bushes where the dog could reach it without leaving the safety of the darkness.

“We are going to have to call animal control soon.” the dishwasher added before returning to the building. “All we need is one customer bit by a stray with rabies and we’ll be out of a job.”

The trash boy nodded, but hoped that the dog moved on to another place in the city before it could come to that. He hated to see any animal suffer on the streets, but it was a better option than ending up in a cage for two weeks before being gassed to death.

Kitty stayed in the bushes until she was certain that the humans were gone. She sniffed at the food that the trash boy had tossed to her and ate a small chunk, testing it for chemicals before eating a few more bites. She had been made sick before by humans setting out food laced with powdered kitchen cleaner and rat poison. And though she had never had a problem while feeding at this location before, she was always careful.

She ate a few more bites, though her belly was already full. Food, while not hard to find at this stage of her life, was always her daily goal. While the dog back at the house she passed had a strict code of protecting his property, she had her own:

FIND FOOD.

FIND SHELTER.

TRUST NO ONE.

Her belly full for the moment, she wandered the city, following her nose and her instincts. She found three more sites to feed from, though she would have competition from the raccoon and other denizens, no doubt. And added to her mental list of hiding places an abandoned car in front of a derelict home, a screen pried off the bottom of an industrial building and a plastic child’s playhouse that might offer some refuge for the night, should her home at the apartment complex become too dangerous to stay in.

She looked up to the moon in the sky, framed by stars and looking for all the world like a saucer of milk that the old woman often left out for the cats on some evenings. She licked her lips at the thought and moved on.
Claws licked against the hard pavement as she meandered home. The guard dog who had so rudely accosted her at the beginning of the evening now lay silent and sleeping beneath the tree to which he was chained. She paused at his gate, tempted to wake him and send him into another barking fit for which she knew that he would be punished. It never ceased to amaze her that humans had set him to guard their home and yet punished him for barking to alert them of intruders in the dead of night.

She sighed and headed past the sleeping dog, her belly full of food and her mind dancing with information she had learned this night. In her heart was the pull of the open road. If she had been human, she might have been a gypsy. Instead she was just following her canine instinct to move on before she over hunted an area, to move along and conquer new lands and perhaps to find a pack of her own. While she had spent the last three years moving alone from place to place, she had a sudden yearning for her own kind.

Not someone like the MINE MINE MINE! the guard dog, she thought to herself. But someone like me. Someone to share her burrow with when the winter nights got cold. Someone to help chase raccoons off with. Someone to pace by her side as she wandered the world.

Back at the apartment complex, she sniffed the entrance to her burrow beneath the building for intruders. It paid to be careful, even in areas she felt safe. It had saved her more times than she could remember. Once from a rabid opossum who had taken over one of her hiding spots as she had gone off for the night on her mission for food. And at least a few times from humane traps that humans had set out to catch her kind.

Smelling only her own musk, she entered the building and paced the dirt three times before settling in to sleep. The earth beneath her was packed hard as stone from the years of use. She had taken the den from a cat three months earlier who in turn had taken it from a skunk. The floor was littered in places with the bones of birds, mice and various bits scavenged from human refuse.

The dog’s leg kicked out at one of these well gnawed bones, a section of pork rib long since chewed clean of flesh and marrow, as she slipped into dream. Once again she was playing with her siblings in the open sunlight until the shadow passed over them, changing her world forever.

The next morning was heralded by the familiar scrape of rubber soled shoes on the black pavement of the back alley. The dog raised her head and yawned, bolting from her hole in the building to chase the dried food pellets that the old woman threw to the ground around her like chickenfeed.