Who saved who?
Sometimes, when a stray wanders into our lives, it's for a reason

Once in a great while, if you are fortunate, an entity will touch your life – rare as a unicorn, bright and transitory as a shooting star. A gift, a fulcrum, perhaps a revelation.

Entities, I say, because not all are human. Maybe, even, had we eyes to see and hearts to feel, most are not.

Our neighborhood, in the skirt of piñon-juniper woodland, has a moderate human population, but other residents abound. Deer, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, coyotes, skunks; not infrequently I follow mountain lion tracks on my morning walk. A trio of bald eagles spent the winter on the ridge behind us. It’s a rich community, but not kind to the vulnerable or infirm wanderer.

The cat appeared to us, one random day when the nights were falling into single digits and puddles never thawed, out of the brush: skeletal, near blind with pus and discharge, skulking and desperate. Feral was my first thought – but when I approached, he thrust his crusty head into my hand. When I left to get him food and water he followed me, diligently as a well-trained dog. After we assembled a place for him in our garden shed, complete with blanket and heater, he still tried to follow me to the house. But I walked him back and pointed at the gapped door, and he entered without me and took up his new abode as if it had always been his. As if he knew. 

Thus he entered our lives.

This is not the self-congratulatory story of adopting an unfortunate creature but a reflection on the myriad lives we overlook. Thibault  – the name we gave him, signifying brave people – exhibited extraordinary qualities from that first day. He, like only two other cats I’ve been privileged to know, transcends the normal limitations of his species. I’ve met a handful of dogs over the years that likewise rose above the conventional understanding of doghood.

I have even, I must acknowledge, encountered a few humans who merit inclusion in this transformative fraternity.

All these shine in memory.

Such beings are scattered like windborne seeds across cultures and centuries, intersecting lives by chance or some unfathomable design. Some become seers, prophets, dreamers and visionaries – even messiahs – while others fall on barren ground where they lie unremarked and ultimately lost.

Time and timing, chance and serendipity, shape our destinies in ways we can never know. A momentary shift in our daily schedule, and Thibault would have ended as a coyote’s meal or a furred and flattened stain on the roadside, another passing casualty, insignificant as the rest. He was, in any event, no more than days from death when he found us.

What story would he tell if only he were able? What chain of circumstance or misfortune threw him onto this precipitous descent? Where had he journeyed, what had he endured? Clearly he was loved once, or he’d not be so human-attuned. Just as clearly, he was somehow severed from that idyllic past, cruelly, casually or just circumstantially.

Something else we can never know.

So one wonders –  one must, unless one deliberately chooses not to – how many others? Not just thrown-away cats or dogs, but humans, too. How many children languishing in refugee camps; how many homeless, so easily dismissed as human flotsam; how many washed in the rising tide of mass migrations, flights from war, poverty, persecution or just a hostile sky or season; how many, subsumed in these hordes of the nameless wounded, carry that same spark, that same potential for extraordinary transcendence, as the stray cat who staggered half-blind and toothless into our quotidian existence and transformed it?

Metaphor abounds and lessons surround us, an encroaching army of wisdom. If we listen, if we see. If we strive to penetrate beyond the disfigured skin, to discern, beneath our differences, our commonalities: deeper than race, gender, religion, nationality – deeper even than species.

Thibault looks into my eyes in a way most cats never do: as if there is a seeking, a reaching for communion. I look back, trying just as hard to connect. Likely I can’t; likely some secret message must remain forever untransmitted, untranslated, interdicted by the gulf between species. But maybe, maybe, the real illumination rises in the attempt.

It’s been a few weeks since Thibault came to us. He’s still not well –wheezing, struggling – but he is improving. We have learned that we’ll never be able to restore him to full health, but we don’t know, can’t know, how long we’ll have with him. Of course that is the great uncertainty each of us must carry through every life, every relationship: the whims of fate and hazard. What we do know is that he has, in his quiet needful way, immeasurably enriched us.

So maybe, even in the darkest times, the fundamental lesson is this: that it will always be the smallest, most unremarked kindnesses, given or received, that sustain us.

Sometime in elementary school, Lawrence Goral decided he wanted to be a novelist when he grew up. Decades later, after an eclectic run of intervening years, he landed in a grown-up job as a technical editor and writer in environmental consulting. Now retired, he and his wife relocated at the tail end of the pandemic from New Mexico to Bayfield, where they have lived with one cat, until the subject of this essay joined them.