On Wednesday, March 8, the sun shone, and there was a promise of 60-degree weather over the weekend. In my tiny urban garden, sparrows fluttered at the feeder, spilling seed on the melting snow. Pigeons announced, cooing and peeping, that babies were being raised in the hole left last fall when part of our crumbling back porch fell down. Stray cats crept into the light and sat still and grew warm, blinking their eyes at the sun. Dense clusters of green spears, from daffodil bulbs I should have divided years ago, poked through the black earth along the south-facing wall of our house, where the snow was already gone.
One chilly morning when I was putting out food, the grubby gray-and-white cat came cautiously up to the fence that separated us. I put two fingers through the wire, and he moved close enough so that I could scratch his head. The next morning when I came out with food, he was waiting on my side of the fence. As I reached the bottom of the stairs he ran up to me, and when I bent down to him he crawled into my arms and purred.
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Outside the rain and snow fell hard and at an angle, so the plastic dome over the bird feeder didn’t keep the wet out. I’d come out most mornings to find the birdseed turned to frozen sludge. I’d use a bamboo stick to dig the stuff out of the long, hateful tube that is a Droll Yankees feeder; then, my hands frozen, I’d find I could barely grasp the doorknob well enough to open the door to the basement, where I kept dry birdseed and fed the cats.
I have no way of knowing how many of the sparrows and pigeons that came to the feeder survived the winter, though feathers I found in the basement gave evidence that at least one sparrow died to supplement the cats’ diet. But we still have sparrows and pigeons, and they have even been joined recently by a redheaded finch.
I looked around the neighborhood for signs, thinking someone might have lost him. When the signs weren’t there, I still figured this cat’s prospects were good: a lot of cat lovers won’t declaw a cat but would be glad enough to take one if the dirty deed had been done by someone else.
At the vet’s we found that George’s pelvis was pretty much a mess; he must have been hit by a car. We did what we could. The vet gave George a large dose of tranquilizer, and we talked to him and stroked him until he relaxed and purred, and then we went on talking to him and petting him until he finally fell into what seemed like a deep sleep. He didn’t seem to notice as the vet shaved his forepaw and then inserted a needle in the exposed vein. Blood swirled into the liquid in the syringe, red mixed with gold, and the liquid disappeared and George was dead.
