The Kitten on the Water Spinach

The canal was running the colour of tea and twice its proper width when the call came. A woman on the bank path had seen something small moving on the flood. Not swimming, she said. Riding. I took the call seriously. Those calls are almost always true.

I found her where the canal bent, and for a moment I did not understand what I was seeing. A mat of water spinach, torn loose from a garden plot upstream, had snagged together into a rough raft the size of a door, and it was turning slowly as the current carried it down the middle of the channel. In the centre of it, soaked to the skin and riding as low as a creature can ride, was a kitten. She could not have been more than seven weeks old. Her grey fur was plastered flat and dark with water. Her paws were spread wide on the stems, gripping, and her whole small body rose and fell with every ripple that ran under the mat.

She was crying as she came toward us, a thin, hoarse sound the water nearly took. Every time the raft turned, she scrambled weakly toward the high side, and cried again. The mat was coming apart as it travelled. Trailing stems were peeling away behind it in long green ribbons, and each time a piece tore free the whole raft lurched and settled lower. She knew. Animals always know. Her eyes were half-closed with exhaustion, but they never left the bank, as if she had fixed on the solid world and was willing it to come closer.

We could not wade to her. The canal in flood is a liar — it looks slow on top and moves like a horse underneath, and the banks were undercut and collapsing in the rain. So we worked from the small wooden footbridge below the bend, with ropes clipped to the railing, and we worked fast. My partner lowered the long-handled landing net from the bridge while I lay flat on the wet planks and reached the boat pole down toward the water, talking to her the whole time, because a kitten who panics on a breaking raft will jump, and jumping was the one thing she could not survive.

The plan was simple and had to work the first time. As the raft came under the bridge, I would catch its leading edge with the pole and drag the whole mat toward the bank side, into the slower water in the bend, where my partner could take her off with the net. The current gave us one pass. If the mat broke up or slipped under the bridge, she would be carried into the fast water beyond the bend, where the canal dropped toward the fields.

The raft came on, turning. I hooked the pole into the thickest part of the mat and pulled, and the stems held, and for three good seconds she was coming toward us, crying steadily now, louder, as if she understood. Then the complication arrived, as it always does. The piece of mat under her back paws tore away with a soft, green ripping sound, and she slid, scrabbling, toward the gap, her hindquarters going into the water. She screamed — a real scream, the first full sound she had made — and hung by her front paws on the stems, her back legs trailing in the current, too weak to haul herself back up.

I dropped the pole and took the net myself, flat on the bridge, shoulder to the planks, and swept it down and under her in one movement, stems and all. She came up in a tangle of water spinach and netting, soaked, spitting canal water, clinging to the mesh with all four paws as if the net were the first honest ground she had felt in hours. I gathered the whole bundle against my chest and held it there while my partner cut the stems away, and inside the tangle a small, sodden body trembled without stopping.

At the station we dried her on warm towels. She weighed almost nothing, and her shivering went on long after she was dry, the leftover shivering of a body that has spent itself completely. The vet checked her once she was warm: chest clear, no water in the lungs that rest would not mend, only cold, hunger, and exhaustion, and paws worn soft from gripping stems. She slept curled inside a folded towel for eleven hours, and woke demanding food in a voice that had found itself again. Within days she was dry, round, and entirely uninterested in water in any of its forms.

She stayed at the shelter for two weeks, growing steadier and louder, and went in the end to the woman who had called us. Her house stands above the canal, and the kitten, grown now, watches the water from a windowsill, from the dry side of the glass.

We named her Noi — the Vietnamese word for floating. It seemed honest: the fast water tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that canal sometimes, when the rains come and the water spinach breaks loose from the garden plots and rides the brown current past the bridge. I think about how close she came, again and again, to simply sliding off the edge of the world, on a raft that was coming apart stem by stem. And someone happened to be walking that bank path that morning. And someone happened to look at the flood debris, closely, the way most people do not, and see that one piece of it was alive.