She rides with the kitten in one hand, a fist full of tiger-striped fur, the tiny creature squirming and mewing in the most desperate of ways. For nearly two miles she clings to the cat, and the cat to her, past pastures and farmhouses, moving toward Spiceland and a decision about what to do with this unexpected find.
The kitten appears to have been abandoned. It cries from the ditch as we pass, two-thirds of the way through our 35-mile ride. We both hear it, but it’s Liz who immediately turns back, who pulls the tiny ball of fluff from the weeds. We wonder if it might have strayed from one of three houses a hundred yards east, but residents of two of those homes say the kitten isn’t theirs, and they tell us the third property owner doesn’t keep cats. We look west then, at the next house impossibly far away, too distant to assume the kitten wandered from there. We glance north and south at nothing but farmland. There is no one left to ask. There is nowhere else to go but home.
Liz pedals stiffly, one hand on her bars, the other holding tight to a kitten fraught with fear and hunger. At Spiceland she stops at a community gazebo in the center of town, while Dave and I ride on, taking a shortcut home over a gravel road we would never consider riding under normal circumstances.
Thirty-five minutes after leaving Liz and the kitten, I’m in Spiceland with the truck, but the cat is gone.
There is a happy ending, however. A local resident going into the bank adjacent to the gazebo saw Liz and the kitten. When she heard the cat’s story, she volunteered to give it a home. That home, it turns out, is a pleasant one-story structure with an expansive yard, someplace we’d ridden past dozens of times. We stop to thank the woman and say goodbye to the kitten, who is in both good hands and good company. The woman and her husband are there, as are their two other cats and a dog.
I’d like to think that I would have stopped for that kitten if Liz hadn’t been there today, that its urgent cries would have been enough for me to knock on doors and, ultimately, carry that creature home. But, more than likely, I would have slowed but not stopped, like the priest and the Levite passing by a half-dead man on a road to Jericho. That truth shames me. And scares me.
Today, however, a Samaritan riding a bicycle heard a cry for help, had compassion and did the right thing.
29.82 miles — Henry County
