Magellan and the squirrels

Magellan came by her name the old-fashioned way. She earned it.

A few years ago, while I was silently battling a painful and chronic illness, I also was teaching World History at an English-language high school in Puerto Rico. On that particular day, I arrived at school feeling quite ill and weak, wondering why I hadn't stayed home rather than battle the consabidos tapones and parking woes that characterize daily life in my small and busy island.

As I walked with slow and measured steps into the school building, I saw some maintenance workers removing two tiny kittens from underneath the central air-conditioning system. They placed them in a box and were taking them away.

"Where are you taking the kittens?" I asked, curious.

"We're putting them out in the dumpster," one of them said matter-of-factly.

"No, you're not," I said with a verve I didn't really have in me. "I'll take the kittens this afternoon when I get out of class. If you can place the box in the maintenance room, I'll pick it up later."

That school day, like most days in that unfortunate year, went by in a blur of work and pain, and soon I was done and ready to collect the box and the kittens. I called my husband and told him what I was bringing home. To his eternal credit, he didn't argue or object. He wasn't much of a pet person but he had generously accepted my two old cats, Nube and Lawrence, as part and parcel of our marriage many years before. Lawrence had died that year at age eighteen, but Nube was still her queenly self, if skinny and aged, at nineteen. He'd later also accepted the addition of two rescued street dogs, both of which had been in bad shape when we got them.

Once I arrived home, we decided to take the kittens to the vet because they looked very small and weak. Dr. Trujillo, a young veterinarian who had recently opened his private practice at walking distance from our small and squarish cement house, said the kittens were only a few weeks old and not yet weaned.

"The mother must have abandoned them," he said after examining the pair. "The black one, the male, has to be put down. He's too anemic to survive. The other one might make it, though"

The other one, a worm-bellied miniature copy of a seal-point Siamese, with gummy and cloudy blue eyes, was anemic and near-death, too. But she kept climbing out of the shoe box in which we'd taken them to Trujillo and trying to explore her surroundings.

"She's something else," the vet said. "She's probably as sick as her brother, but she's still going strong. I could probably find someone to adopt her, if you want to leave her with me."

I gave my husband a pleading look and he knew the kitten was ours to keep. I wasn't about to give up on a creature who, pretty much like me, was struggling against illness and bad odds out of the sheer will to live.

"Magellan," I said. "We'll name her Magellan after the guy who circumnavigated the Earth."

I had just taught my tenth-grade students the story of the man who braved bad weather, hunger and death itself to attempt what no one had done before. His crew, hungry and lacking provisions, would boil their leather correas and drink the broth off their belts. That, I thought after I read about Ferdinand Magellan, is truly a will to live.

Unlike her namesake, however, Magellan cheated death and went on to live a long and happy life with us. When we brought her home, she was no bigger than the TV remote. Now, far from the island of her birth, Magellan likes to sit in front of an upstairs window looking out into the cold Ohio winter days. There, she has daily stare-down contests with the gray squirrels, who like to leave their footprints in the snow and thumb their noses at the gorgeous, seal-point Siamese-looking Puerto Rican cat, who glares at and disdains them with her Caribbean-blue eyes.