Meow, Monsieur!: The French Felines of New Orleans by Jim Gabour

Author:Jim Gabour
Format: epub

Mystères du Tigrou

(Mysteries of the Tigger)

He was deserted by his mother at birth and survived by his wits as a literal infant. He begged for food from seedier neighborhood hangers-on, those scarcely better off than he. He scavenged for meals through rotting garbage in restaurant dumpsters, running between shadows on the precarious New Orleans lakefront. He occasionally trapped a fish, which had strayed into the shallows or found a recently dead crab washed up on the shore.

He slept in abandoned cubbyholes hidden in the maze of small, damp caves that crisscrossed beneath the jagged concrete of Lake Pontchartrain water breaks. Riprap, they called it.

He managed his own life for well over a decade, with help from no one.

Then, as he was trying to cross a street, once again scrabbling for food, he was hit and critically injured by a car. The vehicle rolled over him, and did not stop to help.

Neighbors saw his injury, ran to the accident site and tried to find him. But, like sole survivalists are wont to do, he had instantly gone to ground to try and recover on his own. Other than recent blood stains, there was not even a sign of him to be found when that help first arrived. When by pure chance he was discovered weeks later by a rescuer, he was on the verge of death, had lost one eye, all his teeth, and the use of a leg. His tongue was split down the middle. Untreated, his bones had fused incorrectly.

He was in constant pain, and tried as best he could to communicate that distress. His volunteer doctor ordered him to be taken for rehabilitation to a wooded inland farm in Mississippi, a place that catered to such lost souls. He had really just been settling in there when in 2005 Hurricane Katrina came ashore south of the place, inundating the coastline with a thirty-foot storm surge. Trees and dwellings were considerably thinned.

He survived again, and even began to thrive, together with others of his ilk and age for the first time. By that December he had recovered enough to be offered for adoption on the internet, his story accompanied by a picture of his tortured, though admirable, face.

An adoptive family was not considered a likely result. Even the rescue agency itself admitted that a permanently injured, toothless, and half-blind thirteen-year-old was a long-shot for adoption.

They were out there though. And they had experience with one-eyed cats. Serious experience.

The infamous Le Fred had made a major error a year earlier, when he had attempted to attack both his neighboring poodles at once, in their own yard. It had been a valiant, though doomed battle.

Hearing of Fred’s gallant demise, nearby dog-owning residents of the French Quarter had breathed a deep sigh of relief, sorry to hear of any mortality but knowing that the tormentor of all things canine had now moved to a higher realm. Tourists traveled on rented bikes through the streets of the Lower Quarter not even suspecting that they had missed one of its greatest, and most haughty, attractions.

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