“Poose! Dottie! Jake!” I shouted, trying to gather the cats to feed them. Jake jumped from the roof of my mobile home to a nearby willow tree and glided down the trunk, while Poose followed close behind, chorusing loudly. Dottie did not respond. Her usual routine included sauntering up to the porch an hour or so later and clawing at my metal trailer door until she received her dinner. Her system seldom varied. I predicted she would initiate this nightly drama promptly upon becoming bored with her latest tabby diversion. She didn’t, not that night or any night following.
Dottie heard the dinner call, but she was wholly engrossed in stalking a hard-shelled beetle she had spied while creeping along the nearby forest floor. She crouched patiently, her tail twitching from side to side. She leaped toward the beetle and tried playfully to pin the elusive bug under her small white paws. The beetle escaped and darted for a rock pile. Dottie tried to follow, but she could not. The jagged teeth of a carefully hidden steel trap tore hungrily into her left-hind leg. Confused and helpless, Dottie lay in the damp leaves wondering why she could not go home. She lay still, waiting for something she could not define.
The next morning, Dottie tried often to free her leg. She meowed softly, and then louder, but her cries were heard by no one. A few insensitive ground squirrels scampered about with heartless indifference, too busy gathering hickory nuts to be sympathetic to her plight. Shivering from the cold November air, Dottie tried to crawl to a sun-warmed patch of moss, but the steel vise refused to allow her this luxury.
Minutes passed slowly into hours, hours into days. Each day she remained trapped brought more misery and less chance of survival.
On her sixth day of captivity, Dottie could no longer be recognized as the once perky cat who gleefully investigated every falling leaf and every passing butterfly. Her usual shining coat had become dull and coarse, and her fur was falling out in clumps. The once sparkling eyes now reflected nothing other than desperation. Her shrinking stomach cramped horribly, begging for food with every contraction. Was that a small, gray mouse she had seen flitting behind a fallen pine branch? She longed for the mouse to come close to her. Dottie was starving to death, and she'd had nothing to drink for six days except for the morning dew she greedily lapped from every leaf within reach. Her leg was badly swollen and it soon became inflamed with infection. Convulsing from exposure, she curled herself tightly into a circle and prepared to die.
On the eighth day, Dottie forced her head up slightly and tried to recognize a blur of movement that seemed to be coming toward her. She wondered if the apparition would spare her a small saucer of milk, or perhaps just a tiny sliver of moistened bread to help dampen her parched and aching throat. The vision moved closer. It was a man; she could see him now, and she quickly recognized what he was carrying – a rifle. Too frightened to struggle, and too weak to care, Dottie slowly closed her tearless eyes and prayed for an end to her suffering.
Within moments, Dottie realized that she had been freed. A flicker of half-hope trickled through her stiffened limbs, revitalizing her crippled spirit. Despondent from lack of food, and half-blind from dehydration, Dottie limped slowly away in a direction she hoped would take her home.
I don’t know what made me go outside my trailer so late that night, for it’s something I never did. I noticed my sister’s dog, Shep, lying inside his doghouse with his head resting on the ground halfway out the door. He was acting very strangely – whimpering distressingly, but lying very still. I called for my sister, and she quickly went to investigate. When she kneeled down to see if Shep was all right, she saw Dottie lying just inside the door of the doghouse. Even more amazing than Dottie finding her way back home while in such devastating physical condition was that Shep, a huge German Shepherd, had cast aside his usual contempt for all things feline, and was holding Dottie softly beneath his powerful neck in an attempt to keep her warm. Somehow, that dog knew the gravity of Dottie’s situation.
My sister and I wrapped Dottie in a softest, warmest blanket I could find, and drove her to an animal hospital twenty miles away. Both of us were convinced that Dottie wasn’t going to be alive by the time we met the veterinarian at the hospital, and we braced ourselves for the worst.
But an incredible thing happened. Dottie survived. A hard-core “outside” cat, she stayed inside with me throughout the winter. Her recovery was painful and slow. Her blackened, mutilated leg eventually turned pink and healthy; miraculously, amputation had been avoided. When spring arrived, Dottie made it very clear that it was time for her to return to outside living; she wanted to rejoin her brothers and sisters.
A silent, feeble cat prayer for help was somehow plucked out and answered from among billions of sounds in the universe. Is there a God? Dottie thinks so … and so do I.
