I was walking to the shopping mall today and I finally found the cat which has been meowing outside my window for the last couple of days. It was following a mother and daughter down the road, and I walked up behind them and caught its attention. A couple was passing on a bike and the girl freaked out shouting “look at the cat!! aww… it’s so cute!” and so on and they stopped beside me. The cat is about 4 months old, going by Rocky’s growth. Still pretty small. It has a really really nasty wound over its eye, which is probably at least a week old because it’s a huge scab now. There was also a similar wound on its jaw. The girl asked “is it a girl?” so I checked and it is a girl. She kept rubbing off my legs, jumping up on the bike to get closer to the guy, and rubbing up against the girl. When the girl bent down, the cat climbed up against her legs, got its face up to the girls face and started licking her.
Eventually the couple went off one direction and I went another. The cat followed them wherever they were going and the girl made sure to stop when the cat got distracted to wait for it to catch up. I hope they found some food for the poor thing.
The title of this post is “suteneko”, meaning a stray cat. “Stray” is a much nicer way of saying it though. “Sute” comes from “suteru” 捨てる, the verb “to throw out”, which is most often used for rubbish. As opposed to “stray”, this verb has will behind it, meaning that someone intentionally threw out the cat. Whether that’s the case or not, poor thing could do with a home.
