As soon as I came for her, the cat knew that my intentions were no good. 

This is a cat that loves me intensely, but she was tipped off at once by the harrowed look in my eyes, the trembling of my hands and maybe the quickened, unhappy beat of my heart. 

I went for her first under her favorite hiding spot beneath a futon. Sensing trouble, Maggie somehow retreated further into her hidey hole instead of dashing out, which is what my plan depended on. 

“Come on, girl,” I implored her. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.” 

That was a damn lie and we both knew it. I was harassing poor Maggie in the first place because she’d been constipated and miserable for a week or more and it was time to do something about it. As I scrambled after her, making my hurt-free promises, I knew I was a liar because there ain’t no WAY that un-constipating a cat is going to a pleasant affair. 

Maggie, her eyes the size of half dollars, began to realize that her safe space was not so safe anymore, so she made a dash for it — made a dash so quickly and unexpectedly, in fact, that she slipped right through the waiting arms and gloved hands of my co-conspirator wife. 

Into the bedroom Maggie went, a blur of fur and tail, vanishing into the uncharted labyrinth of storage bins, laundry bags and boxes of unknown content beneath the bed. Maggie dug herself so deeply into that maze of stuff, I had to assume the role of tunnel rat just to confirm her presence. 

What followed was a series of parry and thrusts I don’t much wish to get into. To get a cat out of a deep, deep hiding space, one has to SCARE them out, and intentionally scaring a cat made me want to throw up all over one of those mystery boxes. 

In the end, Maggie made one final run for safety and this time, she was captured and dropped into the crate she must have believed would be her final ride to cat doom. 

What sense of betrayal does a pet feel in times like these? What do they think of the humans who profess to love them but who nonetheless will subject them to such tortures? Is there enough intellect down deep in their soft, humming brains to associate this current trauma with the ongoing pain in their guts? 

These thoughts haunted me on the long ride to the animal clinic in Freeport. Whether they haunted Maggie, as well, remains unknown, for once she realized the impenetrable confines of the crate walls around her, Maggie went dark. Dark and silent. Dark and silent and resigned to whatever cruel fate awaited. 

For the 30 minute ride, there was not so much as a whimper or cry from the back seat, to the point where I half feared Maggie had died of fright. 

But Maggie had not died, she was alive and still saucer-eyed when she was released from the crate and onto the cool examination table 40 minutes after the ordeal began. 

All the humans in the room continued with their promises. 

“Not going to hurt you…” 

“You’ll feel better when it’s over…” 

But the fact was, we didn’t know for sure what ailed the ten-year-old cat. It was her second visit to the vet inside two weeks and her problems had only gotten worse. 

The spiel from the vet was dire; talk of blood work and ultrasounds and the potential for abscesses, tumors and God only knew what other deadly formations that might exist down deep in the guts of my beloved cat. Hope for the best, was the general idea, and prepare for the worst. 

Anybody who has owned a pet knows what this is like. When you bring an animal in with an unknown problem, you’re faced with the fact that in 15 minutes, you might be greeted by a grim-faced vet. He lowers his mask, shakes his head slowly and says, “There’s nothing more we can do for her. The humane thing would be to put her down immediately.” 

This possibility haunted me as well. After all the hours of watching horror movies with this cat; after all the nights of chasing moths around the house together; after all the good cat times we shared over the past ten years, would Maggie’s final memory be of being tormented out of her favorite hiding spots, ruthlessly dug out and dragged away to be killed? 

This was our third visit to the veterinarian’s office for us in the past year and I can honestly tell you this: in spite of my dread of the man with the drill, I’d rather sit through five root canals and three extractions than to endure more nail-biting drama at the vet. 

In the end, it came down to this: Maggie’s guts were full of something. It was probably just poo and if it was, they’d try to hose it out of her. If it was something more, well… Hope for the best and prepare for the worst. 

In a Freeport parking lot I’d never been to before, I spent considerable time doing a kind of despairing poo dance, imploring the God of all creatures to let it be that and nothing more. You’ll never see a guy pray for poop so hard in your life. 

In spite of the prayers and the goofy dance, I remained pessimistic. Let’s face it, there hasn’t been a lot of good news about anything lately. The whole world seems full of encroaching darkness. Bad news has a way of piling up, like sand pushed into heaps by the tide of some black ocean. 

In my head, I could already see the morose face of the doctor delivering his news. I could feel the dead heft of Maggie in my arms. My hands were already preparing for the shovel. 

I don’t reckon I was a lot of fun that day. 

We were tense and gloomy in the waiting room when the vet breezed out of the office. He was on his way to some urgent business and couldn’t talk for long at the moment. 

“A whole lot of poo,” he said. 

My wife made him repeat himself. 

Yup. It was poo. A lot of it, including — a weird point of pride — the biggest ball of poo the doctor had ever seen stuck near the base of Maggie’s tale. 

I didn’t have to endure the procedure for poo removal, so I can’t speak for Maggie directly, but this accumulation of bodily waste was cause for intense and immediate celebration. Instead of a sad, silent ride home with a dead cat in the back seat, we were heading there with a perturbed and dopey pet but one that was alive and on the mend. 

We let the doctor keep the poop ball. I had ideas of fashioning it into some kind of necklace but people got all weird about it so I let it go. 

When I was a kid, we had a whole lot of cats, but they were outdoor animals and so there were almost never any vet visits. These cats played hard every day in the great outdoors and then came home to sleep it off. They chased birds and climbed trees and eventually they’d get hit by cars and that would be that. 

You’d have years of joy with such a cat and then there would be a backyard burial with a makeshift grave marker and sooner or later you’d get another cat and the whole pleasure-pain cycle would repeat. 

This new way of keeping cats is harder. Kept indoors, a cat’s health and well being is completely in the hands of his people. They live longer under the protection of four walls and so you see ailments that an outdoor cat might never experience. Constipation? Dental issues? Ear infections? 

Maybe outdoor cats get those kinds of ailments from time to time, but chances are good that they’ll die by more dramatic means before they are ever subjected to such lowly afflictions, and somehow that seems easier to me. In some strange die-by-the sword kind of way, it seems more romantic and more fitting for a rambunctious creature like the cat.

As for Maggie, a day after we brought her home, she was rolling around on her back, purring like a furry tuning fork and head-butting me in the ribs hard enough to knock me over just to say hello. She was happy and out of pain and she seemed to glory in this restored state of good health.

And she still liked me in spite of all the betrayal and lies I had told — what do you know? Apparently a cat IS capable of forgiveness and maybe even gratitude. 

I just hope Maggie maintains such a good attitude when I start dishing out the high fiber food instead of the good stuff. 

This may be my last transmission. 

Mark LaFlamme is the crime reporter and resident cat whisperer for the Sun Journal. He can be reached at [email protected]