'Miss Kitty? Are you there?'
Posted: Wednesday, September 7 at 06:59 pm CT by Mike Brunker
SLIDELL, La. –- With a mixture of anticipation and dread we set out from the animal rescue center heading for Bill Harris’ condominium, hoping against hope to find his missing cat, Miss Kitty, alive and as well as she could be after nearly a week on her own in a disaster area.
For those who haven’t been following our trip religiously, we met the 63-year-old Harris on Monday at a Red Cross shelter in Evans Creek, La., and heard him tell the most moving tale of surviving Hurricane Katrina that we’ve heard.
Video: Watch Donna Wackerbauer, a Noah’s Wish volunteer from Canada, and Horace Troullier, a Slidell animal control officer, enter Harris’ home in search for Bill Harris' cat, Miss Kitty.
You can read the full account here, but the condensed version is that he woke up to Miss Kitty’s yowling and found his condominium full of water, nearly drowned but saw the cat jump to a safe spot and managed to make his way there, were he found a chair that he stood on for three days, holding Miss Kitty to his chest. Sadly, the rescuers who pulled him into their boat wouldn’t take the cat and, when we talked to him, Bill was disconsolate, worrying about the fate of his 17-year-old brown-and-gray “miracle cat.”
After filing our piece on the animal rescue enter in Slidell in the early afternoon Wednesday, we join Horace Troullier, a Slidell animal control officer, and Donna Wackerbauer, a Noah’s Wish volunteer from Canada, to go to Harris’ home and search for the cat.
After a brief diversion, during which Troullier and Wackerbauer, pick up two kittens and a bedraggled Pekinese found wandering a hard-hit neighborhood by a search-and-rescue team from Alabama, we again set out for Harris’ place.
I feel my breath catch as we turn onto the street where Harris struggled for his life and see the extent of the destruction. Unlike many of the hardest hit areas we’ve visited, which have been scoured clean of detritus, this neighborhood in a division known as Eden Isles is filled with twisted wreckage, garbage and mud.
With no visible addresses, we inch up the street until we spot a fishing boat angled up onto a front doorway and realize we’ve found it.
Carrying a large net and a trap, Troullier and Wackerbauer walk slowly up to the house, gently calling “kitty, kitty,” as they approach. Then they climb in the side of the unit through a large gash in the wall and began poking through the rubble and looking behind and under toppled furniture.
“There are some footprints here, but they’re too big for a cat,” says Wackerbauer, who lives in Summerland, British Columbia, when she isn’t trying to save animals caught up in disasters. “Probably nutria (water-dwelling rodents).”
As Andrew and I follow them in, treading carefully to avoid exposed nails and other potential tetanus delivery systems, we suddenly stop in our tracks. Looking through the exposed framing into a second room, we see the big brass bed that Harris was sitting on as it floated toward a yawning bay window and the raging torrent outside.
Farther off in the corner we see his jumbled radio equipment and a toppled chair that is in the right spot to be the one that provided him with a precarious perch for those three terror-filled days.
But there is no sign of Miss Kitty.
Troullier moves carefully through each room, looking into walls that might provide a hiding place for a terrified cat and sniffing for an odor he hopes not to find – the stench of death. Still nothing.
After nearly half an hour of searching and calling, the rescuers set a trap, baited with a fresh can of Friskies cat food, and retreat from the house.
Even though there is no sign of the cat, that doesn’t mean hope is lost, Troullier and Wackerbauer say.
“Cats are naturally nocturnal animals anyway, so she might be sleeping,” Wackerbauer says. “And a lot of time we have to trap them because they’re so scared.”
We reluctantly follow them back to the shelter, disappointed that we won’t be able to give Harris some sorely needed good news. But Troullier and Wackerbauer promise to check the trap later in the evening and to call us in the event that Miss Kitty has saved one more miracle for her owner.
We’re waiting and hoping.
Catching some Z's -- the hard way
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