Gourmi has golden eyes, black whiskers, and a purr that is completely out of proportion to his size. She loves her green felt fish, cuddles and kibble (hence the name). She has a ridiculous meow, a sort of raspy little “iik” that doesn’t always reach us – every other time she opens her mouth without any sound coming out.
When she arrived at our house, hiding in the belly pocket of my boyfriend’s son’s anorak, she weighed 800 grams, a good 150 of which must have been made up of fleas and ear mites.
He had found her on Décarie Boulevard, where it descends to the level of the highway to pass like her under an overpass. A place of dust and concrete frequented by cars, a few busy passers-by and pigeons with dirty wings. Everything there is an attack on the senses, the noise of cars, the smell of gasoline, the pale lighting, the echo effect specific to tunnels. He was walking on the small raised footbridge when his friend pointed to the asphalt under a car: “Are you a cat”? He jumped over the guardrail to go down onto the track where, after stopping the traffic which was already moving at a snail’s pace, he ended up retrieving the kitten between two cement columns, just before he doesn’t jump to the other side, onto the highway.
A motorist whom he had forced to stop on the pretext that a cat was under his car had just told him, shrugging his shoulders: “It’s just a cat. »
He called me shortly after: “Do you want another cat?” » Of course I didn’t want another cat. But his big sister, who lives with us while waiting to finish renovating a house not far from here, has always dreamed of having a cat, ideally the color of Gourmi-who-had-not-yet -name. The word “destiny” was dropped, but beyond the alignment of the stars, there was the fact that a very small cat was purring in the belly pocket of an anorak. An hour later, the guys arrived at the house.
It was almost a month ago, since Gourmi grew up, she was rid of her moths and fleas and must have gained a good 300 grams. After spending two days completely terrified in the back of a wardrobe, she allowed herself to be tamed at a somewhat astonishing speed, which undoubtedly explained her great needs: she was not 2 months old when she was found.
How did a 6-week-old kitten end up in this hostile place? We’ve asked her the question 100 times, she keeps her little secret. She seems way too young to me to have walked four blocks from a box hypothetically left in front of the SPCA. Did she fall out of a moving car? The possibility that she was intentionally left there, perhaps with brothers and sisters, is not excluded – it is not only the sides of the highway that are dark and ugly in this world.
She’s not the only one who let herself be tamed, obviously. No one can resist a kitten’s face for long, nor the vulnerability of a little being.
It’s an impulse that has its roots in all the “can we keep it?” » of this world, baby birds falling from the nest, injured squirrel, warbler stunned after a collision with a window, so many lives left on old dish towels at the bottom of shoe boxes.
They exist in an absolute present, like little children. There was no ambiguity in the motivations of the young skunk that I found asleep in the henhouse, or in those of the raccoon, undoubtedly sick, who spent an hour watching us play Settlers of Catan. out the window (“can we keep it?”). They lived, like Gourmi when she curls up on our knees or runs away when she catches a glimpse of the other cats.
What is saving a small life compared to collapsing ecosystems and children dying from bombs? It’s not much, really not much, but it’s also a path to them. Maybe not a highway, or even a boulevard running alongside a highway, but certainly a little cleared passage, a gap among the brambles of indifference and cynicism, through which we can see the life that wants to live. It’s a privilege that should not be taken lightly, even when it only weighs 800 grams.