The Kitten Behind the Snow

The storm had been over for six hours when we reached the rocks, but the snowy mountains had not finished with it. Wind still combed the slopes, and every hollow the storm had found, it had filled. A trapper above the treeline had stopped at a known den in a tumble of boulders, because something was scratching, faintly, from inside the rock, and the entrance was gone.

I lay flat and put my ear near the drift where the entrance should have been. At first there was only wind. Then, very faint, a scrabbling came through the packed snow, three weak strokes, a pause, then one stroke more, and then nothing for a long time. Something small was still digging in there, and nearly finished digging.

She was a lynx kitten, perhaps three months old, her tufted ears and spotted coat made for exactly this country and none of its mercy. Her mother had likely been out hunting when the storm came down faster than forecast. The kitten had done the right thing: she had gone deep into the rock den where she was born. Then drifting snow had packed layer on layer across its mouth until the doorway was a wall of white. She had dug at it from inside for hours, and snow dug from the wrong side only falls back into the hole.

Cold works on the very young faster than on anything else. With no mother to curl against, her body had been spending its heat hour by hour, and a kitten who cannot replace heat stops shivering, stops digging, and goes quiet in a way that looks like sleep and is not. Her silence between weak strokes stretched longer each time we listened.

We did not dig straight into the drift. Snow packed over a den mouth is holding a shape, and cutting carelessly could have dropped the whole mass into the tunnel beyond. My partner probed it with a pole, reading its depth by feel. Then we cut it away in blocks from the top, lifting each block clear, never letting loose snow slide toward the opening. The wind kept filling our cut as fast as we emptied it.

When the opening narrowed to the last layer, we stopped using tools. I worked with my gloved hands, easing snow away a little at a time, while my partner lay beside the tunnel mouth making a low, steady sound for her to dig toward, if she still could. For a while there was no answer. Then came one scrape, and another, and a small grey paw pushed weakly through, and I cleared the last snow around it gently.

The complication came as the entrance opened. The sudden inrush of wind and snow startled her, and she dragged herself backward, deeper into the den, away from the opening we had spent an hour making. Going in after her was not an option: a terrified kitten, grabbed at, could hurt herself against the stone. So we backed away, blocked the wind with our bodies, and waited, with a warmed blanket just inside the entrance and my gloved hand resting on it, still as stone. At last she crept forward the length of herself, then again, and laid her chin on the blanket, too weak to go further. I gathered blanket and kitten together, slowly, and drew her out into the light.

She was smaller than her coat suggested, all ribs and trembling, her fur crusted with frost, her eyes half-closed and dull. Her paws were sore from digging, packed with ice, and held against my chest she did not struggle at all. Her shivering came in waves and stopped, the way a fire goes when it is nearly out. Warming a frozen animal is done slowly or it is done harm. In the lee of the boulders we wrapped her in dry layers, put gentle warmth against her a little at a time, cleared the ice from her paws, and let her temperature come back as the vet on the radio directed.

At the valley clinic the vet checked her thoroughly. No broken bones, no frost damage that warmth and time would not mend. Only cold to the core, dehydration, exhaustion, and sore paws. They kept her two days, warming and feeding her in small amounts, and she spent most of it asleep, waking to eat with brightening eyes.

On the second evening a female lynx was seen crossing the slope above the boulders, calling, and returning, and calling again. On the third morning, with the storm a full day gone, we carried the kitten back up and set the open crate in the lee of her own rocks. She came out slowly, ears turning, and then her mother stepped down without a sound, and the kitten went to her in a stumbling, certain line, and was gathered under her chin as if the storm had been a rumour.

We named her Bang — the Vietnamese word for ice. It seemed honest: the snowed-in den tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about those snowy mountains sometimes, when a storm warning comes and the wind starts its work on the high slopes. I think about how a den can be safety and trap in the same night, and how quietly snow closes a door while something small digs at it from the dark side. And someone happened to be checking his line that morning, and happened to stop where an entrance should have been, and to listen instead of walking on. She runs those slopes now, beside her mother.