Highway Cats

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  The old cat climbed up beside her. His coat was ragged and thick with mud. His whiskers were frayed. He looked exhausted.

  “I wasn’t hiding. I was traveling. I’ve been to The Shelter.”

  “The SSS-Shelter!” Khalia glanced around. No one she knew and no one she’d ever heard of had made the trip downtown to The Shelter. The stranglehold of highways around Potterberg guaranteed death to all who tried to enter on foot.

  “Why did you go there?”

  “To look for the kits.”

  “To rescue them, I suppose. What a harebrained idea.”

  Shredder nodded and hung his head. “I was hoping I might at least talk to them, through the walls or something. I couldn’t stand the thought of them locked up alone.” Shredder’s voice began to tremble. “Shut away in that place for weeks and weeks with no one to help…no one, no one…” He broke down and couldn’t go on.

  Khalia’s heart went out to him. She knew he was remembering his own loneliness and the terrifying journey in the baggage compartment.

  “Did you find them?” she asked gently.

  Shredder shook his head. “They weren’t there. I went over every one of the AnCon vehicles, double-checked every door into the place. The kits never made it inside. If they had, I’d have smelled them.”

  “So, where are they?”

  “Gone. Lost. AnCon must’ve gotten rid of them on the way.”

  “Gotten rid of them! How?”

  “Better not to think of that.”

  There was a long silence during which both cats thought of it anyway.

  “Well, ss-so much for your miracles-ss,” Khalia hissed bitterly at last.

  “The kits’ luck finally ran out,” Shredder had to agree.

  “I always-ss knew it would. Jus-ss-st a matter of time.”

  “Such tiny things. I don’t know why I put my hopes on them.”

  “They ss-seemed to be doing okay for a while. I was kind of hopeful myself,” Khalia admitted.

  “We tried to look after them.”

  “We did.”

  “They were too young, that’s all. Too innocent. They didn’t stand a chance in this rotten place.”

  “None of us does, when you think about it,” Khalia couldn’t help blurting out. “Here we are, cornered, in this tiny patch of woods, surrounded on all sides by asphalt and cement. It won’t last, you can bet. It never does for cats like us. The world will catch up and chase us out again.”

  She had hardly finished speaking when, as if to underline the truth of her words, a frightening roar rose from the direction of the shopping center parking lot. Both cats leapt to their feet. A huge bulldozer hove into view, smashing through the trees and squashing bushes left and right. Behind it, a team of long-stemmed, beetle-browed humans advanced on foot, making directly for them. The two cats had only moments to evacuate to a nearby oak before the machine had flattened the rat cages and proceeded to carve a red-brown swath of newly turned earth across Khalia Koo’s farm.

  The noise was hideous. Sound waves echoed through the forest, sending flocks of birds spiraling upward into the sky and small animals scooting underground.

  Khalia and Shredder clung to their tree in terror while the bulldozer plowed through a stone wall and, continuing on, headed for an innocent clump of blue flowers nestled in a clearing beyond. Shredder shut his eyes. It was too awful to watch. Khalia, however, adjusted the potato sack on her head and sharpened her vision.

  Blue flowers?

  She couldn’t remember noticing such a clump on her property before. That color—where had she seen it?—a sort of silvery blue, as of early-morning mist rising off a pond.

  “Shredder, it’s the kits! Look, in the field.”

  Shredder’s eyes flew open.

  They were there, all three of them, huddled in their usual mound, giving off a more powerful radiance than usual, a shine that deepened, it seemed to Shredder, as the bulldozer rumbled toward them.

  The machine’s heavy treads crushed the forest floor. Its big shovel plowed up the earth. The kits were beyond rescue. Once more they cowered in the path of death. Once again, Shredder cringed in horror. And then, at the very last second, an amazing thing happened.

  A clanking sound came from the bulldozer’s motor and its body began to shake. Its pace slowed and changed to a lurching wobble. With an earsplitting shriek, the machine came to a halt. A man stepped out and kicked one of the treads.

  Khalia Koo gave a hiss of astonishment.

  “Did you ss-see that? It bus-ss-sted!”

  “I saw it.”

  “Right in front of the kits. They’re ss-saved.”

  “They seem to be.” Shredder felt quivery with relief.

  “How did that happen? It’s a miracle! If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to think…” Khalia glanced upward suspiciously but the sky was as unrevealing as ever.

  “Still, it makes you wonder,” she murmured to herself, “if Mother Nature herself is watching out for them. But why would that be? They’re only common kittens!”

  Shredder wasn’t listening. He was climbing backward as fast as possible down the oak’s trunk. Khalia Koo tried to climb after him. The potato sack snagged and slowed her down. Such a bother, these disguises! There were times when she was tempted to throw them off and show her real face, shocking as it might be.

  In the distance, she spied Shredder’s old cat figure leaping a stone wall with amazing vigor. On he went, wild with joy, scampering through bushes, galloping past the bulldozer, making headlong for the beautiful blue flowers in the field.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  News of the kits’ return traveled around the little forest with tremendous speed. In a matter of hours, every cat had heard about it. That night, after the road crew had gone, dozens made their way to Khalia Koo’s ruined rat farm for a firsthand view.

  There, beneath the light of a full moon, they came across the silent hulk of the bulldozer and saw the red gash of its treads through the woods. The crushed rat cages were terrifying to behold. What a good thing the rats hadn’t still been inside. No one would wish such an end on even a rat!

  It was the kittens who were the most astounding, though. They looked just as they always had, as tiny and inseparable, as playful and unknowing. Wherever they had been these past weeks, it had left no mark on them. In high spirits, they raced around Shredder, overjoyed at their reunion and wanting to make up for lost time.

  On his side, Shredder brimmed over with happiness, his old cat face shining bright as the moon itself in the night shadows under the trees. Every cat there felt lifted by the sight. A mood of celebration filled the air, as if some important victory had been won, which in a way it had. For once again the kits had survived. They’d done the impossible, beaten the odds. A wary excitement spread through the crowd of cats, a sense that rules had been broken and patterns long in force disturbed.

  What did it mean? No cat could answer that. A few gazed skyward as Khalia Koo had done, in case some ghostly paw should be there stirring the heavens into new configurations. None was, at least none that a scruffy, beaten-down highway cat could at that moment detect.

  Certainly nothing had changed out on Interstate 95, where the evening rush hour was under way as usual. Streams of vehicles sped past churning up an unbreathable mix of sand and dirt. Tractor-trailers roared by like tornados, crushing whatever was in their paths. Motors whined, gears ground, fumes rose.

  Behind a roadside clump of weeds, Murray the Claw and Jolly Roger crouched together, wiping the grit from their eyes and watching for food.

  “I thought you said the little dopes were bagged,” Jolly Roger complained during a lull in the traffic. They’d just come from spying on the happy celebration in the woods.

  “They were! You saw it too,” Murray hissed in reply.

  “So, what are they doing back? It’s embarrassing. They must have somehow got away from AnCon.”

  “Dumb twids like them? They couldn’t get out of a
mud puddle if they fell in.”

  “They must’ve had help again.”

  “They’re frauds,” Murray growled. “Anyone with half a brain could see it. Something fishy’s going on, mark my words. I wouldn’t trust them.”

  “They definitely don’t act like any real kittens I’ve ever seen,” Jolly Roger agreed. “Did you watch them trying to run?”

  “They can’t pounce either. Can’t mew right. Can’t talk, that’s for sure. Haw, there’s not one thing special about them. They can’t do anything!”

  “But…somehow they stopped that bulldozer in its tracks.” A note of awe had entered Jolly Roger’s voice.

  “That wasn’t them!” Murray exploded. “Don’t you start thinking like a moron. What’s come over this woods? We used to know the score around here and be able to deal with it. Now we’re being brainwashed by a bunch of nursery school drop-offs? It’s sad, sad, but you know what? It won’t matter in the end.”

  “It won’t?”

  “No.” Murray leaned over and whispered in Jolly Roger’s ear. “I know a secret!”

  “What?”

  “This forest is dead wood.”

  “You mean…”

  “That’s right—we’re scorched earth, headed for asphalt.”

  “Asphalt! How do you know?”

  Murray nodded wisely. “I’ve seen machines like that one in the field before. They mean one thing: a road is going through.”

  “But the bulldozer broke down!”

  “So? It’ll get fixed. That dozer will be up and running by tomorrow, you watch. Nothing in the world can stop a road from going through once it’s started. Not mountains or rivers, not prairies or deserts, not a jungle full of wild animals and certainly not a bunch of dopey kiddens.”

  Jolly Roger wilted a bit after hearing this, as if he might have put some hope in the kits himself.

  “How about heading up the road for breakfast?” he said, to change the subject. “The moon’s going down. It’ll be morning soon. We’ll get the first pick of jelly doughnuts.”

  Murray nodded. “Good idea! My favorite’s raspberry. What’s yours?”

  “Peach yogurt,” Jolly Roger replied. “It just went on the menu at Hamburger Heaven. Supposed to thicken your hair.”

  “Yogurt!” Murray shivered all over. “I’d rather eat glue!”

  The two cats slouched off into the shadows.

  IF ONLY TIME WOULD STAND STILL.

  If only a full moon casting silvery light on a peaceful meadow in a forgotten woods could shine on forever, protecting it and its inhabitants from change.

  If only night would never end and the sun would never rise on a highway racing with cars, over a shopping center opening its doors for another frantic day of business, on a bulldozer waiting for repair so that work could continue on an important access road.

  This was the wish—the prayer, really—that Shredder found running through his head as he lay beside the sleeping kits in the lost graveyard on the hill.

  He and Khalia had brought the kits there to rest after the evening’s celebration. Now, as the moon sank down one side of the wood and rosy paws of sun began to creep up the other, Shredder watched over them, making sure no falling leaf or wandering beetle would disturb them. Miraculous they might be, but they were also tiny kittens, fragile and unaware. Shredder wanted more than anything to keep them safe.

  Nearby, curled up in various bushes and hollows between the gravestones, other highway cats slept, their dirty tails and broken whiskers giving evidence of their hard lives.

  Why were they here? Because they couldn’t keep away. Like hungry birds drawn to a springtime feeder, they were staying close to the kits. The little ones’ strange sparkly sheen was now visible to all. Through the dark it glowed, an eerie, otherworldly beacon that seemed to those watching no more or less than the glimmer of hope.

  Shredder sighed. The truth was, the future looked grim. An impossible series of miracles would be necessary to save their bit of forest. The old cat knew the signs of road-building as well as Murray the Claw. He knew the power of its machinery and the force of will behind it. Somewhere in the city, high up in one of the office buildings Shredder had passed on his recent journey, a plot had been hatched. A script had been written that could not be unwritten. The stage had been set. Their wood would soon become another strip of roadside brush.

  “What’s-ss wrong?” Khalia Koo’s hiss came suddenly from overhead. She was perched on the crumbling stone wall that ran around the graveyard.

  “Nothing.”

  “You shivered. I thought you might have heard something.”

  “I was remembering another time, another place.” Shredder’s voice trailed away. “There was a small house, a yard, miles of open land…”

  “Your old home.”

  “Yes. I still dream of it sometimes. I had a family once, you know, a bunch of little ones like these.” He curled his weathered tail more closely around the sleeping kits. “They’ve brought it all back, much as I’ve tried to forget.”

  “I guess-ssed there was something like that in your past,” Khalia said. “I never did see you as a hard-bitten road cat.”

  “Oh, I’ve been hard-bitten, all right. I’ve got the scars to prove it. But I never was as tough as I pretended to be. I’ve been scared most of the time. I didn’t want this highway life. I got lost is what happened, and I couldn’t go back.”

  Khalia became silent, for this was exactly what had happened to her. Shredder’s honesty pierced the wall she kept around her heart. Again she felt a desire to throw off her disguise and tell her true story. “I was once a loved cat who had great beauty and many admirers,” she would begin. But then what? How would she dare to show her real face? Her burns were so terrible. Shredder would shut his eyes and run.

  A metallic shriek sounded from the clearing below, followed by the cough of an engine.

  “They’re going to fix it,” Khalia said. “They’re working on it now.”

  “Only a matter of time,” Shredder agreed.

  “I guess it’s back to the highway for us. We’re being ss-shoved out again.”

  The truth of this remark caught Shredder like a punch in the stomach: the unfairness of it, the careless crushing of small lives, the cringing along roadsides and hiding in weeds, choking on fumes and fighting for road food. It was too much to bear. No one, not even a highway cat, should have to live that way.

  “No! I won’t do it,” he muttered.

  “Won’t do what?”

  “I won’t go back out there. I’m too old.”

  Khalia stared down at him.

  “And the kits are too young,” Shredder went on wearily. “Miracles or not, they’re unfit for the road. We’re staying put. This will be our last stop.”

  “But you can’t stay here!” Khalia Koo jumped off the stone wall. “They’re going to level this wood. If you think the kits will stop them, good luck is all I can say. This has gone far beyond what anyone can do.”

  Shredder nodded his old head. “I know, but I’m tired. It’s too late to start over. You go on and save yourself. I’ll stay with the kits and take what comes. They’re the only things I really care about now.”

  Another wheeze rose from the forest below, followed by the piercing squeal of a motor revving up. Around them, the sleeping highway cats leapt to their feet.

  In other parts of the wood, hundreds of birds and wild animals still dozing in the early morning sun also jerked awake. What was that? A storm was coming! All over the wood, warning calls went out and the age-old rustle of frantic preparations could be heard. Bad weather on the way! Get ready! Get ready!

  Meanwhile, the three kittens slept on in the Potter graveyard, seemingly unaware of what was happening around them. Mounded together, their heads nestled on each others’ backs and their paws curled beneath, they looked to Shredder like a silvery patch of forest floor, the kind of enchanted place a woodland makes when left alone, undisturbed. As the sound of fal
ling trees and tearing turf came to his ears from below, the old cat stayed beside the kittens, drawing warmth from their small bodies and waiting for what was to come.

  CHAPTER SIX

  To those traveling by car on Interstate 95 that early spring morning, a strange sight now presented itself. From the woods along the highway, clusters of animals began to appear.

  A mother skunk and her babies scuttled up the shoulder of the road. Two raccoons lumbered out of the brush, blinked at the passing traffic and scooted away toward the overpass.

  Squirrels darted here and there, unable to hold a straight course but keeping generally to one side of the traffic. Not so a fox, who zipped like a red-tailed arrow between the cars, somehow managing to cross all four lanes of eastbound traffic before landing safely on the center median.

  He was followed by five deer and a fawn leaping gracefully lane to lane, crossing the center strip without pause to take on the westbound lanes. Tires screeched. Startled motorists slowed and gaped through their windows. On the heels of the deer came the streaking fox again, dodging bravely between the cars, his slender jaw clenched in fright.

  All that morning, animals came out of the little wood to hop, waddle, scamper, pad, skitter, leap and hustle along the eastbound lanes or to make desperate rushes across the highway. Overhead, birds also were evacuating. Hawks and owls, woodpeckers and starlings, robins and early-arriving swallows, even a family of migrating Canada geese flapped away to other sanctuaries, if any were to be had in that congested landscape.

  The only animals not seen along the road, for once, were highway cats. And this was because, despite all of Khalia’s warnings, most had refused to budge from the old cemetery. They were hunkered down amid the gravestones, sniffing the bulldozer’s gritty fumes, listening to its mash and roar through the trees.

  In the end, Khalia found that she couldn’t leave either. If Shredder was staying, so would she! A strange stubbornness on this point had risen up inside her, though she was the last to see it for what it was. As the morning wore on, she remained, dozing, on the stone wall. Below her, Shredder had fallen into a sound snooze, exhausted from his night of watching over the kits, who continued their nap beside him.