Kitty Salvation

I work in the Naval shipyard at Bremerton WA.. As anyone knows that works in an industrial environment, there are rats. We have a good selection of wharf rats that are vicious and large. I tell you this to give you an idea what the predators of this rats deal with, that is the cats. The cats are feral and fearless. Through generations of selective breeding and shear survival skills they have developed into some of the finest hunters I have ever seen in cats.
About 6 weeks ago I heard a kitten meow in the warehouse section of our building. Now our building is over 150,000 square feet in size so I hoped to keep the litter unknown to management since the shipyard policy was to destroy all cats. Unfortunately day-shift noticed the litter and bothered the mother too much. She shifted the kittens from the box of plugs they were in to a pallet of coiled up steam hoses where we were able to trace them too. Bringing in some cat food in the hopes of keeping the latest location secret, we feed the cat and watched over her new nest. The mother is a gorgeous calico short hair.

But then disaster, I was sent to another part of the yard for a week. When I returned the mother had moved her litter again. This time day-shift was talking about her because her kitten could be heard in a wall. After the shop had settled down that night I went looking for the meow. I could here the kitten but not find them. On second floor of an interior storeroom I found the mother growling and hissing at me. Leaving her alone, I came back during her hunting time at sunset. I could still hear that kitten but could not find them. Carefully searching old boxes and under pallets I finally located the meow to a hole in the floor going down into the main wall. There, 9 feet below me in a concrete retaining wall, I see a little white head and blues eyes crying out her heart.There just was no way to get through the wall to her. I could not bear to leave her there to die, so I found a length of small diameter rope and tied a noose into the end. For the next 20 minutes I prayed as I tried to get that noose around that little kitten. Time after time I would get the noose around her only to have it slip off when I pulled it tight. Several times she retreated out of the reach of the rope under an overhanging concrete shelf. But she came back and I refused to give up. Finally the rope settle around her neck and I jerked it tight, her screams resounding in the space as I hastily pulled her up to me. Safe in my arms at last, I looked at the little dirty snowball that stared at me. I had done it, with God's guiding hand I had manged to pull her from death. I walked with her to the water fountain, where the Foreman and General Foreman were talking about a job. I walked by them and when they saw what was in my arms I told them bluntly, "You don't see anything". The G.F. smiled and turned back to the Foreman.
Tonight Brandywine is terrorizing toes from under the couch. I don't think she understands. She just knows that that toes are fun to attack.