Rescuing Squeaks

There are no clues of this kitten's story. At 3:20 AM, August 8, 2025 Skye alerted me to her presence with odd behavior she exhibits when something is in the yard. Something that has never been here before but something she didn't want to kill. Running back and forth from me to the rear garden box, snuffling and woofing with excitement, all I could tell was that she desperately wanted me to check it out. Cautiously approaching, wary of skunk and rattler and bobcat, not necessarily in that order, a loud squeaking suddenly filled the still night air. It was an odd squeak that I had never heard before. Was it a rabbit or polecat or racoon maimed by the dog? Then she darted out from beneath the covered grill straight at me and stopped on top of my right foot, looking up at me and squeaking loudly for help.

I picked her up. She was covered nose to tail tip with tiny burs and starved so badly I could feel her elbows and backbone and cheekbones protruding sharp and pointy beneath her thin, scruffily-furred skin. She was near death and she knew it as well as I did. And she knew I was her last hope for survival because she continued squeaking frantically for help even as I carried her to the back porch and began combing the burrs out of her dry, dusty fur. An hour later I set her down and fed her some canned tuna. She continued squeaking as she gobbled it all up. I showed her a small bowl of water but she was too young to know how to drink it, getting water up her nose every time she tried. I feared that might cause breathing problems for her, even an infection, so using an eyedropper I managed to get a good amount of long-overdue fluid into her. Setting her down on Skye's pet bed, she immediately fell asleep.

Squeaks' first meal at the homestead.

I've dealt with dying animals over the decades, the first time in winter of 1974 when an acquaintance offloaded a diseased and starved St. Bernard pup on me. He knew me well enough to know I couldn't resist trying to help save it. It died a couple of hours after I reluctantly took it into my little garage apartment. I buried it in the vacant lot across the alley out back and swore to myself I would never take in another animal no matter what condition it was in. The next day I found out where that pup had come from. A friend told me about how it had been kept in an illegal kennel where there were still a lot more dogs starving and at risk of death. Outraged, Ricky and I snuck out there the next night to see if what he had heard was true about the cruel conditions animals were being subjected to there. It was true.

The kennel was a low clapboard structure on a dusty, weed-ridden plot of land south of town at the edge of the breaks. The shed contained several tiny chainlink-fenced pens, each with a single pup in it. It stood unlit. A radio tuned to the local AM station played tinny country music through a lot of static. The pups sensed us as we approached and began wimpering and yipping. We inspected the pens which were all grimy with feces and urine. Some had no water. Without thinking about it much at all, we each grabbed a pup out of its tiny pen and ran back to the car. We talked about going back for the rest but decided it was too risky with all the noise the others were making. We had saved a couple of them and other friends had heard about the illegal kennel, too. Surely some of them would come out and save more.

Friends in town noticed our rescued puppies and talked about them until word got back to the son of a bitch who was keeping them penned up out in the breaks in the illegal kennel. A coach of some sort at the high school I had met only once and never cared to interact with again. A few days later a woman came knocking at my door asking me why I had stolen her puppy. I told her I hadn't stolen any puppy, that I had rescued one from deplorable conditions at an illegal kennel outside town. Taken aback by my response, she blinked then quickly recovered and threatened to file charges for theft against me at the sheriff's office.

That shook me because I had never been in trouble with the law in any form or fashion in my life. I glared at the woman, trying to decide what to do. I didn't want to give the pup to her. She would just take it back out to the nasty kennel with the cheap radio playing for company. I had already grown attached to the pup. She was cagey enough to sense this in my body language and immediately offered to let me off the hook if I paid for the pup. Sixty dollars poorer a few minutes later, I let the pup know it had a new home with me and named it Dillon.

That bitch didn't want the pup and had worked on my innate compassion for suffering animals the same way my acquaintance had when he talked me into taking in the dying St. Bernard pup. But she had profitted from the end result, my acquaintance had not and at least did not try to milk me as that horrible woman did. Now, here was a barely-weened kitten on the verge of death needing to be taken in. No shitty people were coercing me to rescue the kitten, at least not face-to-face. This kitten might have been dumped. A lot of people having adopted pets for company during the pandemic lockdown were now running short on cash and abandoning those hapless pets around countryside locations like mine on a daily basis. The bastards.

Staying up all night keeping an eye on the kitten, I expected to find it dead at any moment. Skye slept next to it protectively, looking up at me expectantly each time I checked on it as if to ask with her big brown eyes if it was going to make it. She did, living through the night to chow down on another helping of tuna and a few more eyedroppers full of water. Skye and I were delighted and correctly guessed she would survive. Cleaned up and purring loudly rather than squeaking for help, I showed her around her new home where everything was strange and exciting instead of scary and dangerous.

Now she romps energetically playing with Skye and by herself, wrestles with the other kitten, Graycee, abandoned here about a month before her arrival, and hangs out in her favorite spot in the garden amongst the morning glory vines.

I guess I'll never learn, and I'll never understand the cruel acts some people are capable of.