Animals             

Wally

W 16" x H 20"

Wally the Wild Wall Cat, and how he got his name

On the third day of spring 2006, I trapped “Wally,” a feral cat, in my garden in Oakland. Our urban neighborhood is overrun with feral cats and it has become my role to catch, spay/neuter, and release or shelter the few that would visit my garden. It was three in the morning when I heard him in the trap and brought him inside. In the morning, as I tried to transfer him to a pet carrier for his trip to the vet, Wally showed just how wild he was by escaping and disappearing through a hole in the wall. The wall he chose was no ordinary wall but an eighty foot long utility chase! He vanished into a maze of pipes, insulation, and joist spaces giving him limitless places to hide in my eight-unit building. Though confident I could lure him back into a trap, my task became more and more daunting as the hours turned to days and the day to weeks. For two weeks we could hear him moving around and could see paw prints in the flour we used to powder part of the chase. Fearing a good deed gone badly, I had holes cut into the outer wall so that he could escape to the outdoors. Still, we heard and saw signs of Wally—he had taken on the presence of a ghost that was haunting our house. Finally his stoicism weakened and he began to cry softly and he sounded like he may be stuck in the wall next to my bathroom. In desperation, I cut a hole in the wall and slept on the bathroom floor, hoping to be of some help to the poor creature. After my night on the floor, we noticed that the towels in the closet were messed up and upon closer inspection smelled of cat. Wally had left the wall, but where was he now? Patrick, my partner, followed his nose into my dressing room and just as he thought he had finished his search, spotted an inch of a tail of an otherwise invisible cat. We had him cornered! Wally’s capture and caging went without incident. After a week of recuperating from his ordeal and recovering from his fast, I brought him to the vet but not until I had made a contraption that ensured me that we could transfer him from his big cage to the carrier. We handled him carefully and still he managed to bite Russell, my handyman. Wally spent another week with me and he began to calm down but it did not seem right to set such a wild and high strung cat loose into an urban setting. We decided that Wally should retire to Russell’s Russian River Home for Wayward Cats, a good sized enclosed sanctuary that houses another 6 cats on a redwood forested hillside. Wally now shares room and board with the other Oakland refugees and, as you can see in his portrait, he is thriving in his new setting. This painting was created and sold as part of a fundraising drive for a cat protection organization.