Week Seven: Don't Mess with Cats

My mother stands at 5 foot 3 inches with wrinkles by her eyes, a result of time passed, laughter, and the stress of having two daughters. Or so she tells us. Her hair is in a loose bob that she's had since she gave birth to my older sister. 

"You've only had three haircuts in your life," I jokingly tell her sometimes. "A mullet, perm, and now a bob.”

But that's just who she is. She doesn't like change, and she doesn't like fuss. Why change something that's already good? She laughs easily, a quality I always admired, and speaks to people like she's known them all her life. I've never met a living thing that didn't like her. Not human or animal or even bug. She'd probably never even been stung by a bee and she definitely prefers escorting spiders and wayward ladybugs outside, as opposed to joining them with the underside of her shoe. She loves everyone and everything, which can either be naive or painfully optimistic.  There is one man, however, whose house she still looks at with scorn, even though he moved away years ago.

It started with a small cage, no bigger than the size of a raccoon or skunk, nestled in the valley that separated our house from the neighbors. It was No Man's Land, a respectable place that neither of us claimed or rejected as a part of our property, so it remained untouched until that day. It was insignificant at the time, probably a piece of junk that fell from his yard. It was summer or sprint, or something in between and so we didn't give it much thought- there were bigger things on our minds. Days passed, weeks passed. Sometimes a fleeting thought, there's that cage again, or what's he doing with it? But as soon as we passed it, it left our minds. 

Enter: skunk.

A skunk's only defense is their infamous scent glands, which release a horrible oder that cannot easily be washed from clothes or skin or hair. But inside that cage, the skunk was rendered helpless- its stripped tail restrained from going upward, preventing the release of its only defense. This was not worrisome either. My mother always saw the good in others and never assumed the worst, despite how horrible the world can be.

"He'll probably release it somewhere," she said hopefully.

He did not.

Instead, our neighbor backed his truck over to the cage, put a tarp and hose to the skunk and left his engine running. My mother tore over to his house and ripped the cage away from the truck in a futile attempt to save it, but it had already died. Asphyxiated. She was too late.

I watched, horrified, as my mother banged on his door. He didn't answer. I'd never seen her so angry. It scared me.

On and on she went about the dead skunk. Days passed, then weeks, and still, when she saw his house, she became angry all over again. The neighbor had broken her sacred rule of assuming the best in every situation, so when we saw that scrap of metal waiting again, she was more prepared. My mother would not give him a second chance. She watched for activity, for a curious animal to wind up stuck just as the skunk did. There were none. At least, we thought there were none.

A dead cat appeared in our yard, discovered by my dog, a week or so later. It looked asleep, stlll in the grass without a hair out of place. But nothing was that still. Nothing alive. It looked like it'd died naturally, but we knew better. He killed a cat. Who killed cats besides serial killers? Men plagued with slightly off kilter neighbors who screamed about skunks? 

Whoever he was, he was a new kind of deranged. All her life, my mother sheltered us and herself from the horrors of the real world. She ignored the news and newspapers because they were too sad. But suddenly the horribleness of the world was embodied into one man- that horrible, horrible neighbor. This cat killing was a criminal offense, punishable only through the same horrible circumstances the skunk and cat had to endure- trapped in a cage, dying scared and helpless.

We tried everything within our ability to save any future animals that would wander into his yard. We called the police and animal control, but in Michigan it was legal to kill these animals seen as pests. If we took the cage, we would be the criminals. If we stepped into no man's land, which we discovered to be his property, again, we would be the criminals. We were as helpless as the skunk and cat.

Months passed, and we hoped he learned remorse. Like clockwork, the cage appeared. But my mother was ready this time. She waited until a small black cat appeared in the cage, cowering and yowling to be let free. My mother pounced, taking the cage from his yard, she banged the door until the wife of the murderer answered.

"It looks like you caught my cat," my mother said. "I'll return your trap when I'm done with it.”

We took the cat, an angry stray, to the vet. They took it to a rehabilitation home that turns feral cats into adoptable cats- giving a potentially dead cat hope.

My mother won this battle, but like they say, the war was not over. She returned the cage, and again, it appeared in No Man's Land. Another animal, another announcement that it was our pet. This became a complicated tactic when it came to possums and skunks (which were obviously not our pets), but who were they to doubt our word? 

Still, no matter the animals we saved, we knew there were probably an equal amount being killed by that man alone. And then there were all the others in the world, and that made us wonder: were we making a difference? Or were we just as helpless as the caged animals.