Could Not Not

So I'm taking a little bike ride, like I do every day now, for at least an hour.  I love riding.  It was near dark last night I went, waited a bit long so I stuffed a tiny flashlight in my pocket, so I wouldn't get a ticket if total darkness fell before I got back home.

I was somewhere, on a street I did not know, and I see a cat in front of me, crossing the street.  I can tell by its swagger and war wounds it's a big unfixed male.  Sure enough, he turned to mark someone's front door.  I was slowed now, and lecturing the cat, as I often do, mad as I have become, crazy as a loon some might say.  I was telling him "somebody needs a neuter job" almost in a taunting tone.  But I was doing so to slow him down to try to get a look at him and assess porches for food dishes, or ratty houses with trash, where people don't give a crap about anything, including fixing their cats or caring for them.

About this time I passed a cross street and down it I see some teens playing in the street.  Teen cats. Not humans.

I swerve into that street and watch them run up a driveway and I hear kitten mews, from some bushes.  Tiny kitten mews.  I don't look for them.  Instead, I go knock on the front door of the nicely kept house and a woman answers immediately and I ask about the kittens and tell her how I love cats and used to get cats fixed, the whole bit.

She said God sent me, that I'm an angel, that her husband has cancer and the orange and white female showed up pregnant last spring so she's fed her, she had to she said, she couldn't just let her starve, but she's overwhelmed.  She has her own cat and two dogs and the husband with cancer.  The girl had two boys first litter and now has had a second litter two weeks ago and there are seven.  I said "What's your plan for them?"  She shook her head and said she didn't know.

I got her number and rode home and messaged a Portland rescue woman and she said "Yes" to bring them tomorrow and drop them at her vet clinic.  So off I went this morning. I trapped the mother, only for expediency.  She's tame.  Then I pulled the seven kittens from their nest in some bushes atop the rocks and gravel.

Then the woman asked if I could take the teen boys up too, from the female's first litter.  She said they were born first of May.  Last night, she had wanted to keep them, for her grand daughter, who loves them.  This morning she said she and her husband had talked and they'd agreed that God had sent me, so we better not piss off God, she said, by not sending them all off to better lives. I said nothing.  (I'm an atheist) The Portland rescue said they'd take the boys too.  So I dropped both into the one carrier left that I had and off we went.  The woman gave me $25 to cover my gas.

My camera was on the wrong setting so the photos are not great.   Ten cats out of Albany, for good.  That's a victory for all cats.  And these little guys don't have to sleep on rocks.

Rock Nest Kittens---all seven of them.

Awkward family photos---mom tries to nurse the kittens while sideways in the trap.

On watch, at the vet clinic, with kittens.

Red and Toby, polydactyl teens from her first litter this summer.

Stalled in traffic on the under construction Sellwood Bridge I took a photo to the north, of Portland and the Willamette and one to the south.

Portland and the Willamette, from the Sellwood.

South of the Sellwood.

I went for the bike ride.   I ended up half lost on streets unknown and the cats who needed me called me to them.  I could not not help.  What else am I going to do.