Catch & Release

Listen to the audio: https://venture-within.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Catch-Release.m4a

It started with the discovery of a flurry of feathers. The fluffy grey tufts were so small, no bigger than dimes, and tossed throughout my bedroom floor like deflated party balloons long abandoned after a party.

Moths, geckos, and grasshoppers had thankfully been my only gifts from Tino these last couple of years. I don’t take these spoils away from her immediately, but rather, I try to be a good cat mom, praising her hunter skills and recognizing her gift-giving nature.

However, if there’s a moment of possible escape for her prey, I try to save each little life, reptilian or powder-winged, even if it means a paw slap and a sour emerald stink-eye from my pretty little cat when I do.

But the feathers.

This was next-level horror. Eventually, I found the remains of the poor thing. Battered, but not bloody, and definitely dead lying limp in the back of my closet. She’d killed it while I was away, a detail of the scene that brought up mixed emotions for me.

On the one hand, I was proud of Tino. She’d been hunting the ground-grazing birds for months, eyeing them from my porch, then stalking tiger-like through the grass, her black and white spotted fur not at all camouflaged on the straight, bright green…