The New Yorker:

For nearly a year, a motley crew scoured New Orleans for a shaggy white mutt named Scrim.

By David W. Brown

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.

Go to link