The Kitten Who Went To Heaven (On Earth)

October 4 2022

This story is horse-related since it happened at an Endurance ride!

Friday night before I crawl in my bed (car) at Ridecamp at the Autumn Sun Pioneer/Distance Nationals Endurance ride, I am brushing my teeth under the stars, when I hear a “Mew”. Huh? A bobcat? A strange bird? “Mew.” 

I turn my headlamp on and swing it around, looking for eyes. No eyes, no more sound. That was weird. Ridecamp is out in the middle of Desert Nowhere.

Next morning get up to my alarm in the cold and dark, crawl out of my bed (car), fumble around to make coffee, say hi to Karen B who’s walking her dog Pickles in the dark, and “Mew.”

“Did you hear that?” We listen, and “Mew.” That has to be a cat! I turn on my headlamp and we walk toward the big flatbed water truck toting a big tank of water that’s being used to fill the water tubs in camp and on the trail. “Mew. Mew.” Whaaaaaat? Definitely a cat. There shouldn’t be a cat out here! Is it in the truck cab? Inside the water tank?? No. We walk around the other side of the truck. “Mew. Mew.” Where is this thing??

I duck below the flatbed and holy crap there’s a tiny kitten on the tire. “Mew. Mew. Mew.” OMG! Instinctively I grab it - it won’t let go of the tire with one claw, because it’s afraid, but it wants to be rescued but it’s hanging on mighty tightly to that rubber. I unhook the claw and cradle her under my chin inside my coat. She’s clawing me because she’s scared but she’s purring like a noisy 350 horsepower generator.

Ooooooh kitty! A rescued kitten! Where on earth did it come from!? 

But wait - now what! I didn’t have a plan beyond grabbing it. This is beyond my capacity to deal with. I can’t put it anywhere, it will run away. I can’t leave it in my car. It needs care. And I have to leave shortly to go out on the trail to take photos! What on earth do I do with this tiny thing, now that I impetuously committed to rescuing it! 

Of course I walk right up to Dr Mel’s trailer and knock on the door, hoping Mel and Tom are already awake, because Mel will know what to do. She says something from inside the trailer, and at the door I say, “I need help!” The kitten is still clawing me but purring ferociously nonstop. It’s still a bit scared but knows it’s struck the jackpot, and it’s not going anywhere.

And I get an idea, “Karen, Regina has a dog crate in her truck, can you go grab it?”

And of course as soon as Tom opens the door and Mel sees the kitten snuggled under my chin, she goes into crisis care mode. “Oh yea, I’ve got some canned chicken here,” as she’s grabbing cans, “we’ll put some water in this dish here,” as she pulls out and runs water in a little bowl, “and I’ve got some wood chips we can use in a litter box. Yep, her eyes are weepy and she’s a bit emaciated and she’s got a respiratory infection, not uncommon for a stressed kitten. Some food and TLC and antibiotics and she’ll be fine. 

“Obviously, her name’s Autumn Sun.”

Mel opens a can of chicken and sets it on the trailer bumper, and I put the kitten down and that was all she wrote. I don’t even have to hold onto her because she is starving and she isn’t leaving that chicken! Karen brings the dog crate, and we bundle the kitten, can of chicken, water dish, cat potty, and even the soft dog rug into the crate and the kitten never stops eating. 

I have to leave so I put the crate in a very conspicuous spot under one of the tents, like right where people will stumble over it or run into it, so that the kitten can see a lot of people throughout the day, and continuously piteously purr and Mew and attract the sympathy of some sucker who might take her home. (Mel can’t take the kitten; she already has too many. I can’t keep a cat; where I live it would get eaten in 1 hour by any number of critters, domestic and wild.)

I worry about that kitten all day while out shooting pictures. When I return to Ridecamp and walk to the tent where the dog crate had been - it’s gone!

I find Mel. “Did somebody take the kitten?”

“Yes, Mike Cobbley adopted it.”

“Well, I was kind of thinking about getting a cat,” Mike said later, “and you can clearly see SUCKER written on my forehead.”

It took Autumn Sun about the same time it took for her to wolf down a can of chicken (5 minutes) for Mike Cobbley, Jessica Cobbley, the two Hyuge dogs and tiny pipsqueak dog to fall under her spell. She adapted to Mike’s house like she was born there.

“Mike’s Sucker Cat,” Mike says, clearly stricken.

Autumn Sun the kitten struck gold at the Autumn Sun ride. I don’t know where on earth the kitten came from, but you can clearly see from her photos that she is wise beyond her months, and she was meant to be where she is now!

 

Firecracker Willie and the Autumn Sun Endurance Ride

October 24 2021

He’s gonna blow…

Any minute now… I thought, as I walked a lit firecracker around Ridecamp. Hillbillie Willie pranced beside me, neck bowed, eyeballs rolled forward, as a long squeal like I’ve never heard - like 20 seconds long, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! - slipped out between his curled lips. He was just on the edge of exploding.

This would be my fourth year shooting the Autumn Sun Pioneer ride, but gosh, I sure wanted to ride Hillbillie Willie there one day. I’m not sure if Ride Manager Jessica Huber suggested it or if I did; it became a plan. This year I’d shoot 2 days and ride 1 day.

Willie’s pals DWA Barack and DWA Saruq accompanied him to Ridecamp. The plan was that Willie and Barack would ride on opposite days, so Saruq would be the babysitter with the one left in camp. That didn’t quite turn out as planned, and it was Saruq that could have used the babysitter on day 3, as that was the day Willie and Barack went out together on Sunday on the 50.

Which meant that Willie was in a small pen for 3 days, and he just about couldn’t stand himself, especially when I took him out to walk by himself, away from his buddies.

I’ve ridden this horse in Endurance for 5 seasons now, and he’d never been so tightly wound, and so buddied up with his bros. I ride him by himself all the time at home and he’s just fine, but this time that just didn’t translate to Ridecamp. 

I saddled him up Saturday afternoon for a pre-ride warmup, climbed aboard the sizzling firecracker, and trotted him out of camp, and up the road, hoping he would just trot and not prop and buck! Fortunately his legs are so long that it’s not easy for him to buck, and it’s just easier to channel that energy forward, so LET’S GO! I told him. Blow off some of that steam. Defuse that bomb about to detonate! It wasn’t a long warm-up ride, but it did take a little of the stuffing out of him (and I stayed on!), and he was a little calmer back in camp.

At the start of Day 3’s 50, he was happy, since he was headed out on trail with his best bro Barack. (And Barack had done Day 2’s 30-miler, so he was like - eh, whatever.) But I was back aboard an electrical shorting fuse the first few miles of the ride. When Willie is hot, he bows his neck like a tough racehorse (keep in mind the Standardbred racehorses go with their heads high up in the air). He looks like he’s pulling hard but he really doesn’t, but with every stride he slipped along faster and faster, and I kept having to check him. I finally had to stuff him behind Barack for a while, and once we started climbing up the canyon, and the boys started huffing and puffing, the real Hillbillie Willie started to come back to earth, a forward, energetic horse, going along on a loose rein (most of the time).

I lucked out riding Day 3, with loop 1 being one of the most scenic trails of Autumn Sun. This trail is what gave Ride Manager Jessica Huber the idea to put on a ride here. Winding up through a series of canyons, on a trail far below rhyolite cliffs and rock formations, Willie watched his footing on the trail while I scanned the ridges for a cougar, like Tracy and Tom saw last year. I didn’t see any, but, like my Forest Service ranger friend once told me when I complained I never saw any cougars, “Oh, but they see you!”

Some of the trails were lava rocky and technical, requiring a horse to walk and pay attention, much of the trails were smooth 2-track where you could move out on. Willie and Barack worked well together, rotating being in front and behind and beside each other (though Willie always erred on the faster side of trotting), and while Willie tends to take a ride VERY SERIOUSLY, he’s learned from Barack that sometimes it’s OK to stop and grab a few bites of grass, or at least grab them on the go. 

On one stretch the ranchers’ cow water troughs we were allowed to use were empty - the ranchers had just drained them a few days before for the winter. Willie was thirsty, and he was terribly disappointed to find the bottom of one trough covered in cow pies (likely the cows' opinions on the empty water trough!), and by God Willie made his way over to an icky looking cow pond where he sunk to his ankles in cow muck as he sucked down the murky liquid. At home we liked to keep our water buckets and troughs so clean, but this was good wild desert water (next year’s ride will be a week earlier, so the springs/cow troughs will still have water).

The weather was perfect, not too hot, not too cold, trail conditions perfect. We crossed the finish line tying for last place, tying for the coveted Turtle Award (fun turtle aprons made and donated by Lynn White), and just for grins I showed Willie for Best Condition (knowing we had no chance at that, since I’m a featherweight and we finished almost 2 1/2 hours behind the winners). 

And what a super surprise and treat, High Vet Score went to Hillbillie Willie!

Jessica's dad Wally Bodenhofer took the pix on day 3 so I could ride. Yay!