The Face of Terror

Last Tuesday, the family spent the day moving our cows to a different pasture.

 

We loaded up our horses and drove to our starting point to gather cows, which was a twenty minute drive from home. Our son followed in his pickup because he and my husband planned to gather up and move salt once we got all the cows moved.

When we went to unload the horses, I had never seen a more traumatized-looking animal from a measly ride in a horse trailer before. Upon our arrival, our son headed to the back of the trailer to get horses unloaded and swung open the horse trailer gate to a surprise.

I was chugging down the last of my coffee with one hand and trying to tuck my shirt in with the other, when I thought I heard my son holler from the back of the trailer “HEY, LOOK, A KITTEN!”  Confident that he was he was probably just seeing dried horse poop shaped like a kitten or something, I walked back to verify my assumption. When I came to look, all four horses were plastered to the front of the trailer like bricks slammed against the corner of a pickup box after taking a sharp corner too fast.

The Face of Terror

 

I looked where he was pointing and there, in a crevice of the back of the trailer’s frame was a month old gray striped kitten. He had his back to us and was standing on his hind legs in a climbing position wedged as tightly as possible into the narrow space. He looked over his shoulder at us with a petrified look on his face.

 No matter how wild our barn cats look, they’re not thrill seekers, but this little guy looked as though he had just taken his first rollercoaster ride to hell. He was so traumatized that he didn’t move or attempt escape when my son went to grab him.

Since we just got there and needed to start moving cows, we opted to put him in our son’s pickup until we got back and rolled the window partially down, then started gathering up cows.

During the ride, my daughter would periodically say out of the blue, “I wonder how the kitten’s doing.”

The critter was on her mind the whole time we were busy pushing cows and she was anxious to get back to check on him and more importantly, hold and pet him for a while.

It was later in the day when we got back to the pickups and trailer. My daughter and I were to take the horses back home, unsaddle them and turn them out while the guys took the other pickup to go after salt. My daughter eagerly volunteered to be in charge of the kitten on the drive home and make sure that he got home safely.

 

The whole way back, she tried to tame the kitten as much as possible before we pulled into the yard because she knows barn kittens are hard to catch once they’re set free. Like the rest of our wild little barn cats, this little guy could easily find his way out of a paper sack, just not out of a horse trailer.