“Flopped At My Feet”
When Angel Mum called, Simba, Rockie and Cougar came out of hiding and went straight to her. The three exhausted kittens simply flopped down together at her feet.
Illustration © CatsHope™
The Journey — The story as told by Rockie Page 3
The Sound We Knew
There was one feeding routine we understood. Around dinner time, Mr P would shake the kibble container. We knew that sound. Food.
Simba, Cougar and I would come.
He would pour kibble onto the familiar orange plate Angel Mum had given him, and the three of us would gather around it to eat. I knew that plate. It had come from home. For a while, that was our routine.
Shake, shake…..Three kittens appeared.
Then one evening, Mr P shook the kibble container. Simba came. I came. Cougar didn’t.
Perhaps she was tucked away somewhere in one of the side rooms. Perhaps she was with Granny. We didn’t know.
The next time Mr P called us for dinner, Cougar didn’t appear again. Then another dinner passed. Still no Cougar.
There were so many places for a little cat to hide amongst those rooms and all the things stored inside them. Mr P looked for her. He couldn’t find her.
After Cougar had failed to appear for dinner for three days, he called Angel Mum. He thought Cougar was missing.
The Questions
The telephone call began with Cougar. But Angel Mum started asking questions. What had been happening? What were we eating? How were we being fed? And then she asked about Mother. Where was Tami?
Mr P told her that Mother had rejected us. Not long after we arrived, she had begun growling and hissing at us. She wouldn’t let us nurse anymore. Eventually, she didn’t want us coming close to her. Then he told Angel Mum that about two weeks after we arrived, Mother had left the house.
But she had been found. Mother had gone to stay at a neighbour’s home nearby. So Angel Mum kept asking questions. Where was Mother now? Was she still at the neighbour’s home?
More questions were asked. And another answer emerged. Mother wasn’t at the neighbour’s home anymore. She had disappeared from there too. She had already been missing for weeks.
The call had begun because Mr P couldn’t find one kitten. Now Angel Mum had discovered that Mother was missing too. We knew none of this. We didn’t hear that telephone conversation. We didn’t know Angel Mum was asking questions about us. We didn’t know she had just discovered that Mother had been missing for weeks. We were simply three kittens somewhere inside that enormous house.
Simba.
Cougar.
And me.
Mr P couldn’t find Cougar. Nobody knew where Mother was. But Angel Mum knew where to find us.
Then We Heard Her.
She came to the house. And then I heard something. A voice. A voice I knew. I hadn’t heard it for a long time, but I knew it immediately. Angel Mum was calling us.
I came out of hiding. Simba came. And Cougar — the kitten everyone thought was missing —
came too. All three of us came when she called. We went straight to her. And then we flopped down at her feet. All three of us.
Angel Mum looked at us.
We were exhausted. We were in terrible condition. We were not the kittens she had brought to this house two months earlier. We couldn’t tell her what had happened. We couldn’t explain the food. We couldn’t tell her how much we had eaten. We couldn’t explain what it had been like after Mother disappeared. We couldn’t tell her where Cougar had been hiding. We didn’t need to.
Angel Mum could see us. And this time, someone noticed.
