My daughter Cassidy is visiting from California for the summer. At nineteen, she floats somewhere between childhood and adulthood. As of late, I’m not sure whether to hold her hand or let her figure things out on her own. The former tends to be effective only if it’s an occasional exception to the latter.
The other night, she and her step-sister Aimée approached me as I closed up the chicken coop. Cassidy gently cradled a baby bird that they’d found on the other side of the farm. We assumed it had fallen out of a tree.
I explained that there was nothing we could do. Cassidy and I were leaving for Bordeaux in the morning, so it wasn’t like we could try to nurse the little guy back to health ourselves. There are no special shelters or rescue services for baby birds in rural France. Inquiries into such services would be met with polite indifference, followed by next-morning café gossip regarding the crazy Americans.
Sometimes, real life doesn’t parallel the inspiring TicTok vignettes and Disney movies we wish it would. Fate had dealt this animal a bad hand.
We walked back to where they found the bird. I explained that this was its best chance in case its mother returned. I didn’t believe a word I was saying. It was dusk and I’d just put six chickens to bed inside a fortified, locked coop inside a wire enclosure. I know how nighttime predators work.
Cassidy gently set it down. I encouraged the girls to walk away and not look back.
I checked on the bird shortly thereafter. It was gone.
A week later, Cassidy was helping me tractor the upper field, the first mow of the summer. Thanks to a rainy spring, the grass had grown to our waists and the weeds had gone Jurassic, some looming two-meters high. It had become a luxury condo complex for all manner of rodent.
Following my first pass, Cassidy flagged me down over the diesel chug to let me know she’d found a small mouse in the path of the tractor.
I’d clipped it, not enough to kill it, but enough to inflict an impossibly cruel mortal wound.
Again, I told my daughter to walk away, but she wouldn’t. In tears, she walked down to the house and returned with a shovel, intent on “doing the right thing.” She handed me the shovel, with which she planned to dig a burial plot.
She picked up the animal. She was shaking. Brave, bold, and too young for this sort of unfair shit. I took the bird from her and asked her go into the house for a minute. I’d take care of it.
Once Cassidy was gone, I took the mouse to the street and put the mouse out of its suffering, surprised by the sob I let out as the shovel came down. Except for fish and bugs, I don’t think I’ve ever killed anything before. Whenever we have mice or rats in the house, we use no-kill traps. I drive a few miles away to set them free. We’re also strictly catch-and-release when it comes to household spiders, bees, and the enormous, three-inch-long stag beetle Marilyne found in the attic the other night.
When I returned from disposing of the body, I found Cassidy in the field, crying. “I’m sorry,” she choked out between tears.
I wrapped my arms around her. “Don’t ever apologize for being human,” I said.
Cassidy and I returned to work. Within seconds, she found another baby mouse next to the tractor. I’d probably upset a nest. She again launched into Florence Nightingale mode and bent down to pick up the animal, hoping to save at least one soul during her farm visit.
Then she paused. “Nope. That’s not how it works here,” she said, resolutely.
We watched the tiny rodent struggle. He seemed intact and aware. After a minute, he scrambled into the deep grass. I told Cassidy that he had a good chance of making it.
This time, I actually believed it.
While I’m not much of a killer—intentionally, at least—our kittens are already seasoned hunters. Both Donut and Mandy prowl around our property and bring home the occasional mouse or lizard. After all, they’re cats.
So far, Mandy isn’t much of an explorer, limiting her hunting ground to our front and backyards. Donut, on the other hand, holds a vast domain spreading into our neighbor’s fields. Boy cats do this instinctively in search of mates.
I don’t know if he’s found any new lady friends (not that he’d be able to do anything about it), but he has had a few run-ins with a big, orange tabby with overlapping territory.
A few weeks back, he started the morning with one these scraps. Always the protective mama, Marilyne kept him inside for the rest of the day. By five o’clock, he was bouncing off the walls, so I suggested letting him out in hopes that we’d all get some sleep that night. She demurred. He gladly bolted.
A couple hours later, when he typically returns for dinner, there was no sign of him. Around nine, we went on an extensive search, but no luck. Marilyne waited up until eleven.
We haven’t installed cat flaps yet, so she left all the doors open when she came to bed. The risk of curious rats, mice, foxes, badgers, or pigs wandering in seemed acceptable. We both woke up about every two hours and went downstairs to see if he’d returned, half expecting to find a wild boar lying by the still-warm potbelly stove.
At six in the morning, no Donut, so I got dressed and went downstairs to begin the search anew. I was surprised to find him in the fuel room, curled up in a tattered rattan basket we use for kindling.
He looked at me expectedly, so I picked him up. He immediately howled. He’s normally a cuddly cat, so this seemed odd. I set him down in the living room, wondering if his overnight adventure had somehow awoken his feral roots, the way he had gone a bit savage a few weeks back after fighting with the orange tabby.
He lay on the ground like a little sack of potatoes. I sat down cross-legged next to him. He crawled towards me, using only his front paws, so I gently picked him up again. Again, he howled, so I set him on my lap, where he curled into a ball.
Then I saw the abrasions on his hip and blood coming out of his penis.
I called to Marilyne. She came running. We tried to inspect him, but he wouldn’t let us touch his lower half.
Despite it being Sunday, our vet answered the phone and told us to meet him at his office in Giat at eight am.
We arrived at the office at the same time. His pants were tucked into high gumboots. Perhaps he was fresh from attending to the birth of a foal or nursing an ailing goat. A country animal doctor’s work is never done, but as far as I’m concerned, the man was a saint.
He resembles a kinder, gentler, balding version of renowned character actor Gary Oldman, which made it weird to watch him tend to our poor cat.
He gave Donut a shot to knock him out and took x-rays. The cat’s left femur was crushed and yanked away from the hip. His right knee was also completely smashed.
We asked if he’d been hit by a car. Dr. Saint Oldman said no, he’d been run over by a car.
Most days, you can count the number of cars and tractors that drive by our house on one hand. Like the little mouse and the baby bird, Donut had hit a patch of remarkably bad luck.
The basket I found him in was at least fifty feet from the closest road. The path between the two is blocked by a three-foot stone fence and either several stone steps or a steep, grassy hill, then a cobblestone path. Donut had crawled across all of that—or maybe even further—in this condition.
All I could think was, “You tough little bastard.”
Dr. Saint Oldman explained that Donut was potentially a candidate for surgery, provided his spine was intact and his guts weren’t smashed up. Cats, especially young ones, are remarkably flexible and resilient, so he stood a decent chance. We needed to check back on Tuesday.
For the next few days, Donut was sequestered to his portable transport cage. We did our best to make him comfortable by shoving his favorite pillow in there. Marilyne tied some of his toys to the top so they dangled in front of him. We fed him by hand and stroked his fur for hours, getting the occasional gurgled purr.
Mandy kept her distance, maybe unnerved by her brother’s condition. We put the cage on our bed and took turns sleeping with him because we couldn’t all fit. Mandy would cuddle up with whoever was stuck in the spare bedroom.
On the second day, I hovered him over the litter box and he peed. It was pink, but not deep red. A good sign that his insides were working. A day later, we did the same drill and he pooped. Another good sign. He quickly taught us a special meow that meant he had to go to the bathroom. He was compliant to be held—a real show of trust for such a proud creature—provided we tilted him forward when he was done so he could shovel sand for a few seconds with his front paws.
Overall, he was a good patient, despite doing everything he could to escape, once crawling out of the top of the cage when it was on the couch, dropping three feet to the ground, and scrambling under a chair. He wasn’t especially fast without the use of his back legs, so it was easy to catch him, put him back in the cage, and make a point of keeping the top closed when we left the room.
Dr. Saint Oldman wasn’t in the office on Tuesday, so his associate, a tall, thin Belgian vet who looks like nobody famous, tested his reflexes. They were fine.
Donut was officially a candidate for surgery. The doctor said he’d get us an estimate from the surgeon. That night, I emailed our financial advisor and told him he’d need to sell some stocks.
He also gave Donut a morphine shot for pain, but it just made him all the more eager to get out of the cage, so we declined further shots. I figured that if he was aware of his pain, he’d be prone to stay still and avoid further damage.
I had to go to Switzerland for work when the surgery was scheduled, so Marilyne’s mom came to help.
The knee was salvaged with some hardware, but the hip was a complete write-off, so they replaced the femur ball with what looked like three, randomly-placed, tiny tent stakes. When Marilyne questioned this, the surgeon assured her that it would work… probably.
I can’t imagine what all this would cost in the United States, especially in Los Angeles, but the bill so far for consultations, drugs, x-rays, and double-surgery has amounted to less that USD2000. It would be easy to blame greedy American veterinarians for this cost disparity, but there are plenty of Americans willing to pay vast sums to save their pets, so these professionals are simply charging what the market will bear.
Pets are precious in rural France, but people seem more pragmatic.
Marilyne and I, maybe not so much. I would have paid a lot more to reassemble our cat. The tough little bastard crawled across an unspeakable obstacle course to survive when other cats—or dogs or humans—might have crawled into a ditch on the side of the road. Donut wanted to live and he wanted our help—so we gave it to him.
As I write this a month later, Dr. Saint Oldman tells us that Donut is healing up nicely. He has a limp and he tends to favor his front paws. When he climbs, he looks like that one badass kid in sixth grade who could climb the rope in gym class without using his legs. When he runs, he gallops with his two rear legs hitting the ground at the same time to disperse impact.
Mandy’s hesitance towards him was fleeting. The two roll around together like the siblings they are. It will be a while before he can venture outside. We still see that orange cat lurking about, so when he does exit the building, he’s going to have to deal with that.
I’ve been told repeatedly that life is cruel in the country and that I need to develop a thicker skin. With mice and birds, I’m doing just that. Eventually, one of our chickens will buy the farm, so to speak, and I think I’m ready for that too.
But when it comes to the cats, I’m not sure that’s a callus I can form.