We had a horrifying, turned wonderful adventure here this last week. Many have asked for the story so I thought I would write it down here.
As most of you know, we have goats and chickens and miscellaneous other creatures running around our place. Therefor we have hay and grain, which means we also have mice. Thus necessitating getting a couple barn cats.
I got one from the shelter here last year who seems to have a goof feral look in his eyes, but he has ended up being quite friendly and lazy.
He does not catch mice.
So when I saw an ad for barn kittens about a month ago I called.
Enter Coal and Glory.
They are brother and sister, Coal is black as you can imagine and Glory is a gray tabby.
My kids were ecstatic. Especially my 6 year old, Juliette, who has been wanting a cat for a couple years now. Juliette proceeded to spend most of her time out in the garage torturing playing with Glory who has pretty much become hers.
Well. On Sunday, my husband, Jeremiah, needed to make an egg delivery in town so he hopped in his car and took off. Unfortunately not realizing both the kittens had crawled up under the car and were along for the ride.
About 30 minutes later Juliette comes running into the house, “Mom, I can’t find Glory!”
She had found Coal up at the top of the driveway, mewing, but couldn’t find his sister. So I went out and searched and searched for her. She didn’t turn up (of course) so, thinking she must have been eaten by something (understand we live in the mountains of Montana near Yellowstone, so small defenseless animals often get eaten by predators), I headed back into the house to care my now awake 2 year old, when the phone rang.
It was Jeremiah telling me what had happened.
He had gotten on the freeway and sped up to go around a slow car, went around them and got back in the right hand lane. Immediately the slow car sped up and came up beside him with their window down, obviously wanting to say something to him. He rolled his window down and they told him a cat had jumped from his car, tumbled and ran into the bushes. He was going 80 mph.
He pulled over, knowing it had to be one of the kittens, and went looking. He looked all up and down the freeway until a police officer came and told him he couldn’t be parked along the freeway and needed to move on.
So he ran to town, delivered the eggs and called me. Of course I freaked out.
So he went back to where he thought she probably jumped out and looked again for a while, until he saw the police officer coming back, so he came home.
The cat happened to jump out along a stretch of the freeway that runs parallel to a hiking trail, so we were optimistic that if she survived the jump she would perhaps find some hikers who would take her to the shelter. So I got my oldest son, Linus, and headed over to the trail head to hike the trail and just see if we could find her.
After about 3 hours of searching and calling, nothing. Linus found some cool rocks but that was about it.
I really was not optimistic that she could have survived the tumble from the car, but you never know right? So we knocked on the doors of the houses near the trail head and left my phone number and went home.
Once home I called the shelter and reported her missing and also posted an ad on craigslist, you never know…
It was a very hard night. We knew, even if Glory had survived the tumble, surviving a night outside here was highly unlikely. Juliette and I were basket cases. She would start crying and then I would start crying and she would cry harder and then I would too. Jeremiah eventually had to break us up.
At bedtime, Juliette prayed the sweetest prayer for God to bring Glory back safe and sound. When I left the room she was bawling. Jeremiah went up and comforted her for a while (he has a special touch with her).
She had nightmares all night of horrible things happening to poor little Glory out in the wilderness. It just broke my heart.
The next morning, Juliette got all her art supplies out and sat at the counter, working very hard on something. Suddenly she asked me, “Mom, did Glory have white on head too, or just on her shoulders?” I realized she was trying make a sign for her missing kitten and was coloring a picture of her. Gah!!!! So I got on the computer and helped her make a sign using one of the photos I had just taken of the two of them. Then we dashed over to the trail head and posted the signs and looked again to no avail but Juliette felt much better having done something.
The next day Jeremiah and I started discussing maybe getting another kitten to replace Glory. I think Coal was as miserable as Juliette with her gone. He didn’t have anyone to play with 🙁
Then, that night just as we were getting settled in to bed, the phone rang. We don’t typically get phone calls at 10 o’clock at night so it seemed odd, but Jeremiah went and answered it. I overhear, “No way! Wow! Well, great. Ya, I’ll see you in a minute.” he comes into our room and just SMILES.
I’m like, what? Then I realized what it had to be, “Did someone find Glory?!”
“Yup.”
“What?!!!!!! No WAY.”
So off he went to collect her, he took Coal with him. So cute! While they were gone, I got fresh water, food and milk ready for her knowing she would be hungry and thirsty.
When he got back I had to know what happened so as Glory chugged down milk and gobbled up kitten chow and some meat he told me some hikers saw Juliette’s little sign and of course thought, “Oh too bad, probably got eaten….” which is what everyone thinks when they see one of those signs out here, and continued on to the trail. Well then on their way back from the hike, they heard mewing in the bushes. Well I had put on the sign that Glory comes when you call her, so they called her. Apparently it was mildly frightening because it was rather late at night and this is an area where we do have cougars and wolves and all kinds of scary things and they could hear something coming at them through the brush but out popped a kitten! Of course it was Glory 🙂
So they grabbed her and called us.
Is that CRAZY or what?! An 80 mph jump, two nights and nearly 3 days in the mountains this tiny kitten survived. I think she may have used one of those 9 lives on this one…
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