Hissing foster kitten now sleeps under the covers

Katie fosters cats in Virginia, and this one started with a message about a kitten loose in a parking lot. Katie went out and found her there, running around and playing as if the lot were a yard. She came back with a friend, traps and food, and it took a few tries before the kitten was finally inside one.

At home, the kitten was nervous and so was Katie. The name she picked was Luci, short for Lucifer, which tells you how the first days went. The hissing did not stop, and for a while Luci would not come out from under the bed at all. "I think I might be in over my head," Katie says.

Katie took her for mean at first, but Luci was really just scared of people. Some reading gave Katie a plan. Luci had to learn to link her with food, so she only ate while Katie was in the room and talking to her. Hunger did some of the work, and every meal was a few more minutes near a human who did nothing worse than sit and chat.

It worked by inches. Three weeks in, the hissing stopped, and Katie moved on to petting her. Luci let her, then began to want it, and soon she was playing.

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The rest followed. Luci made friends with Katie's own cat, came out of her shell and took up kissing her person. The things people notice now are the dark freckles on her pink nose, and a purr she had kept to herself for weeks. "She's come such a long way," Katie says, "and she really is very sweet."

Some nights Luci sleeps on the pillow next to Katie. Other nights she crawls under the covers and settles in beside the person she spent three weeks hissing at.