Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Story of Lil Dude - Part Two (Saturday)

Saturday morning, Mr. Dizzy was scheduled to work overtime. When he left, he didn't see the kitten in the garage but figured it was hiding behind something.

Later that morning, I left to go grocery shopping; I also didn't see the kitten. When I got back from shopping, still no kitten...what the...? Did it slip out somehow? I was pretty concerned. So, when Mr. Dizzy came home from work, we started searching through the garage. No kitten. We started tearing everything away from the walls; still no luck. We spent almost 2 hours tearing things apart, with no kitten in sight. We were pretty dejected, thinking it had slipped out and we would never find it.

Mr. Dizzy was on his hands and knees, pushing something back beside our big upright freezer, when suddenly he noticed something.....under the freezer, behind the grate, was a pair of green eyes. That's all he could see, just green eyes. (Well, it WAS dark under there, and the kitten was black.) He tried knocking on the grate to scare it out from under there, with no luck. Finally, he got something narrow that would fit between the grate and started carefully poking around in there, so as not to hurt it. The kitten finally crawled out the back of the freezer, into my waiting hands. And it's a good thing I had heavy leather gloves on! It was scared to death, biting the glove, clawing, but as I held it, it stopped and just laid there in my hands, its little heart just pounding.

We got the kitten inside the house and put it in the back bathroom, where it would be safe from the other cats, and shut it inside. Next, we moved the litter box, rugs, blanket, and food/water into the bathroom so it would have all the necessities. Mr. Dizzy went off to Menard's to get a pet gate for the doorway so we wouldn't have to keep the door shut and have the poor thing totally isolated; it had gone through enough trauma in its short life already. While he was gone, I shut myself in there with the kitten and sat there on the floor, talking softly to it. I could not get him to come near me, but it did sit there and listen to my voice, and seemed to calm down a bit.

Mr. Dizzy got home with the pet gate, and we put it in the doorway. It was a very high gate; the size for large dogs, so we figured that would keep it in the room and our two furbabies out. We kept going back checking on the kitten periodically, just to make sure it was okay, and just talking to it to try to get it used to us.

Finally, we headed off to bed, hoping that the little thing would be okay during the night, but knowing that with that big pet gate, it would be safe and secure.

Or so we thought! (Silly us!)

Around 2:00 AM, Mr. Dizzy woke up feeling something on his feet. He raised up his head and looked around the bed; our two cats were both asleep on my side of the bed . . . and the little kitten was on the bed, sitting on Mr. Dizzy's feet! He started sitting up, and the kitten got scared and jumped off the bed and ran out of the room. We got up and looked around, but we could not find it. So, we took down the pet gate (since it obviously didn't keep him in!) so that it could reach the food/water and litter box, and went back to bed.

We could tell this was going to be quite a ride.....

To be continued.....

No comments: