The first time I glimpsed the city of New Orleans, I was a small boy in the wheelhouse of a tugboat. My father pushed barges up and down the Mississippi River, and sometimes he let me tag along. The city seemed so luminous at night—so different from tiny Convent, Louisiana, where I was from—that it felt otherworldly and inaccessible. In 2020, I moved there during a painful divorce. Because of that childhood memory, my relocation felt somehow transgressive. I was going where I did not belong.
Shortly thereafter, I began to notice the cats. About a dozen lingered, lazy yet alert, behind my apartment complex. Whenever someone approached, they scattered and hid beneath the building. (I found their behavior relatable.) One evening, I came upon a lean and scraggly cat on the sidewalk that looked dead. Upon closer inspection, I saw that her eyes were swollen shut. She scurried off when I reached out to comfort her.
That night, I stared at my ceiling, worrying that the cat would waste away or wander into traffic. The next morning, I left out something for her to eat. A friend suggested that I research “trap, neuter, return” groups, which sterilize and vaccinate feral cats.
Two days later, I met Nita Hemeter, the short, bespectacled co-founder of a nonprofit called Trap Dat Cat, in front of her pink house. Her face bore the weary bemusement of a veteran of some terrible war. She told me that she had started rescuing animals after reading “Animal Liberation,” by the philosopher Peter Singer, and she lent me two traps. “I’ve been trying for years to get someone to volunteer to trap at that apartment,” she told me. If I succeeded in my mission, she went on, her organization would find the cat a veterinarian.
I baited the traps with mackerel, per Nita’s instructions. Cats sniffed through the wires; one sat on top, as if mocking my efforts, and another crawled inside. But the injured cat appeared only once, uninterested in the trap. After two nights, I resorted to a backup plan: giving out food directly, in hopes of rallying her immune system. Her fellow-cats weren’t going to wait for her to find her Friskies, so this effectively meant feeding the entire colony every day and night. Within a few weeks, Squinty Cat was letting me stand beside her while she ate, and her eyes seemed healed. But now I had a different problem. The cats expected me.
My nightly rounds, which cost a fortune in cat food, continued even after I moved to a new apartment. (My daughter joked that the cats had given me toxoplasmosis and were controlling my mind.) The traps worked fine on other cats; each time a newcomer appeared, I trapped her, brought her to Nita, and released her after a vet neutered and vaccinated her. Each one must have felt like she was being briefly abducted by a U.F.O.
The cats led me, in a roundabout way, to a dog. Three years after I adopted the colony, while checking my mailbox, I made eye contact with a woman who was stapling signs to telephone poles: Michelle Cheramie, the founding director of Zeus’ Rescues, another local nonprofit. I knew her organization well; I’d adopted two house cats from Zeus’. “I lost my dog here in Mid-City,” she said, and handed me a flyer, which I accepted out of politeness. “LOST,” it read. “PINK COLLAR, BROWN SPOTS. IF YOU SEE SCRIM, DON’T CHASE.” It featured a shaggy white dog with sad eyes and floppy ears, along with her phone number.
I was not planning to look for the dog. If anything, I planned to look away. I didn’t have the capacity to care for more animals, and I knew I’d feel beholden to any needy creature I saw. But it was difficult to ignore the van from Zeus’ Rescues, which started turning up at all hours. Whenever someone reported a sighting, Michelle posted the location on social media.
Late one night, weeks later, while depressed and doomscrolling in bed, I came across a string of recent Scrim sightings at intersections near my house. “If you are in the area, please text with location, direction headed and a picture if you can get one,” Michelle wrote. I don’t know why I went out that night. I’m not even a dog person. But it was that or reflect on every mistake I’d ever made.
Two minutes later, two blocks from home, I saw him—a seventeen-pound mutt sniffing around someone’s garden. I kept my distance and messaged Michelle. Immediately, she called me. “The rescue van is just around the corner,” she said. “Keep an eye on him.” The street was poorly lit, with gnarled tree roots that animals could hide behind; passing cars created their own roving shadows. Scrim vanished.
When the van rolled up behind me, Tammy Murray, a woman in a T-shirt and yoga pants, climbed out. She seemed to be not much older than me, perhaps in her early fifties, and she looked exhausted. I told her what had happened. “He does that,” she said. I live in Mid-City, a historically working-class residential area that is more laid-back and lived-in than the French Quarter, a couple miles away. It’s known for colorful shotgun houses, which are tightly clustered and raised against flooding. Tammy typically brought snares or a net gun to Scrim encounters, but he could duck under a house and emerge a block away.
Michelle originally rescued Scrim from a kill shelter in November, 2023, shortly before he was set to be euthanized. He was physically healthy but behaved like a dog who’d experienced abuse and neglect. During a three-month foster placement, he was docile and frightened, but not aggressive. Then, on the first night of a trial adoption in Mid-City, he escaped.
Tammy and her partner, Freba Maulauizada, both lived in Mid-City and had backgrounds in animal rescue, so a couple days after he got loose they volunteered to help. Michelle lived Uptown, twenty minutes away, so she gave them the keys to the rescue van. But Scrim wasn’t food-motivated and ignored traps. You couldn’t get close enough to use a catch pole or a net. He had “lost-dog syndrome,” which meant that he was fear-driven and survival-focussed, and he responded to calls by running.
Over the next several weeks, Michelle asked people to share footage of Scrim from home-security cameras. A record-breaking heat wave settled in, and Scrim was moving only at night. Volunteers organized a neighborhood-wide stakeout, which had the feel of a quiet, quintessentially New Orleans block party—people sitting on porches, drinking wine. I manned a street corner from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M. Even then, there were so many people patrolling the area that Google Maps showed standstill traffic. None of them found Scrim.
After that first night, I found myself driving the long way home from my cat colony. For reasons that weren’t clear to me, I went for early-morning walks and evening runs in places where he’d been spotted. I often saw Tammy in the van. I also noticed a middle-aged woman, who had short blond hair and bright-blue eyes, zipping around on an electric scooter at odd hours and in odd places. Finally, driving by one day, I rolled down my window and asked what she was doing.
“Looking for that dog,” she said in a melodic New Orleans accent. Her name was Barbara Burger, and she worked as a court reporter. Each night, she drove twenty minutes from the suburb of River Ridge to help. “It’s so sad that he’s still running the streets,” she told me. She, too, tended to a cat colony.
Sometimes, I saw a tattooed woman in her early thirties, serenely riding her bicycle. I assumed that she was either dealing drugs or searching for Scrim. Eventually, she introduced herself as Bonnie Goodson. “I’m six years sober, living in New Orleans, so I dabble in insomnia,” she told me. She’d always been too scared of bad drivers to bike in the city, but she felt safer at night.
By late July, Tammy, Michelle, Barbara, Bonnie, and I were sharing updates over a walkie-talkie app called Zello. It wasn’t exactly a social activity; the only way to cover a lot of ground was to avoid one another. But we were seeing our city in a new way. Michelle heard updates from cops and sex workers; even people who stole catalytic converters from cars started to look familiar. We also learned about each other. Michelle, who’d previously worked in I.T., started Zeus’ after seeing the plight of animals during Hurricane Katrina. Bonnie had been in the film industry for fifteen years. Freba, I learned, had migrated to the United States from Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded. When Tammy told her that I had done a tour of duty there, she lit up and said, “You’ve been to my country?” We often talked about her homeland. She once wrote that, as a gay Muslim person in a red state, she identified with the way pit bulls are stereotyped and stigmatized.