Part 2: The Security Camera at My Convenience Store in Albuquerque Caught a Starving Stray Pit Bull Doing the Same Thing Every Night for Six Weeks Before I Finally Watched the Footage. He Was Letting a Stray Cat Eat First. The Reason Was on a Folded Piece of Cardboard the Animal Control Officer Found in His Collar.

Part 2

I will tell you about the cat now, because the cat matters.

She was a small black-and-white tuxedo cat. Maybe three or four years old. Maybe seven pounds. She had a white chest, four white paws, a white blaze on her face, and a black mask around her eyes that made her look like she had been drawn in two colors of ink. She had one notched ear — the right one — which is the universal sign in animal-control communities that a cat has been spayed and released as part of a trap-neuter-return program. She had been through the system at some point.

She had been living under the dumpster behind my store since early January.

I had known about her. I had seen her come out at night. I had been throwing scraps under the dumpster for her on cold nights since the second week she showed up. She was wary. She would not come near me. She would not come out from under the dumpster until I had gone inside and turned out the back light.

I called her Bonita. I did not give her the name out loud. I just thought it in my head every time I saw her. Lupita found out three weeks later and rolled her eyes at me and said Reuben, you are going to end up with a cat, and I said I am not going to end up with a cat.

She was right and I was wrong.

I want you to understand the order of operations behind my store, so that you understand what the camera saw.

Behind the Big Sky Mini Mart there is a small concrete loading area, about fifteen feet by twenty feet, with a single industrial dumpster pushed against the back wall of the building. The dumpster sits on four small wheels and there is a gap of about six inches between the bottom of the dumpster and the asphalt — enough space for a seven-pound cat to live underneath. There is one rear exterior door, which is the door I use to take out the trash. There is one security camera mounted at the corner of the roofline, angled down at the dumpster.

The camera is a cheap Lorex unit I bought in 2019 after somebody tried to break into the back door at two in the morning. The footage records to a hard drive in my office. The hard drive holds about ninety days of footage on a loop.

I do not look at the footage. I have never looked at the footage, except after the break-in attempt. I do not have time to look at it.

When the brindle Pit Bull showed up in February, I did not know what he was doing back there. I knew the food was disappearing. I knew the container was being cleaned. I assumed he was eating. I assumed she was eating. I assumed that meant they were both eating.

I assumed it because I have known dogs all my life and the dogs I have known will eat first, second, third, and only stop when the food is gone.

I did not know yet that this particular dog was different.

Part 3

The morning I finally looked at the footage was a Sunday in late March.

I had been having trouble with the camera. The Lorex app on my phone had been giving me an error code for two days. I sat down in the small office at the back of the store on Sunday morning, before we opened, with a cup of coffee, to see if I could fix it.

The fix turned out to be simple. The hard drive was about to run out of space and the app was warning me. I needed to either delete old footage or buy a larger drive.

I opened the footage browser to see how full the drive was. I clicked on a random night to make sure the recordings were working.

The night I clicked on was a Tuesday in mid-February. The timestamp was 10:43 p.m.

I watched the playback at four-times speed for about thirty seconds.

Then I stopped it.

I rewound.

I watched it at normal speed.

This is what the camera showed.

The brindle Pit Bull came around the right side of the dumpster at ten forty-three exactly. He was carrying the Styrofoam container in his mouth. He had pulled it out of the bin where I had thrown it, gently, without tearing it. He set the container down on the asphalt about four feet in front of the dumpster.

He did not eat from it.

He sat down. He sat about four feet away from the container. He looked at the container. He waited.

At ten forty-six, the small tuxedo cat came out from under the dumpster. Slowly. Cautiously. Her tail low. She walked up to the container. She sniffed it. She looked at the Pit Bull.

The Pit Bull did not move.

He did not lean toward the container. He did not lick his lips. He did not even watch her. He kept his head slightly turned away — toward the alley, toward the street — the way a dog deliberately doesn’t make eye contact when he is trying not to make another animal nervous.

The cat ate.

She ate for about twelve minutes. She picked at the burrito. She ate the cheese. She ate the bean filling. She licked the foil. When she had had as much as a seven-pound cat could have, she sat down beside the container and groomed her face.

Then she walked back under the dumpster.

The Pit Bull waited.

He waited two more minutes after she was gone. He stood up. He walked slowly to the container. He ate what was left.

There was not very much left.

He licked the container. He nosed the container into the corner against the wall, the way a dog tidies up after himself. He looked up at the camera once — directly into the lens, for about two seconds — and then he walked east, out of the frame, the way he had come.

The whole sequence had taken twenty-seven minutes.

I rewound. I watched it again.

Then I opened the night before. And the night before that. And the week before. And the week before that.

It was the same thing.

Every. Single. Night.

For forty-three nights in a row, the Pit Bull had carried the container out, set it down, sat exactly four feet away, and waited for the cat. He had not eaten until she had finished. He had never tried to eat first. He had not, in any of the footage I watched that Sunday morning, made one move toward the food while she was at the container.

I sat in my office in front of the monitor and I did not move for a long time.

I called animal control on Monday morning at seven a.m.

I told the dispatcher I had something they needed to see.

Part 4

The officer who came out was a woman named Daniela Ortega.

She was probably forty. She wore the Bernalillo County Animal Welfare uniform. She had her hair pulled back. She had a humane trap in the back of her truck. She came in through the front of the store at eight forty in the morning, and I took her back to the office and I showed her the footage.

She watched four nights of it.

She did not say anything while she watched. She had a particular kind of quiet that I have seen on people who do hard work for a long time and do not waste their words.

When the fourth clip ended, she sat back in the chair.

She said: “Mr. Castaño. How long has this been going on?”

I said, “Six weeks.”

She said, “Have you seen him in person?”

I said, “Most mornings. He sits across the street for an hour around six forty. He won’t come near me.”

She said, “Will he come near food?”

I said, “He carries it back here. He doesn’t take it from a hand.”

She said, “Okay.”

She stood up. She walked out to her truck. She came back with a softer trap — a smaller one with a fabric lining — and a second trap for the cat. She told me she wanted to catch them both.

She said: “I think they have a story we don’t know yet. I want to know it before we separate them.”

She set the traps that afternoon, baited with wet cat food in one and a thawed hamburger patty in the other, behind the dumpster.

The Pit Bull walked into the dog trap at eleven oh-six that night.

He did not panic. He did not throw himself against the door. The trap had a delayed mechanism — it did not close instantly — and according to the camera footage, he walked in, ate the hamburger patty calmly, and then sat down inside the closed trap and waited.

He did not look distressed.

He looked, more than anything else, tired.

Bonita the cat went into the second trap forty-seven minutes later.

Daniela came back at six the next morning. She loaded both traps into her truck. She drove them to the Bernalillo County Animal Care Center on Second Street.

She called me at nine fifteen that morning.

She said: “Mr. Castaño. Can you come down here? There’s something I want to show you.”

Part 5

I drove to the Animal Care Center at nine forty-five.

Daniela met me in the front lobby. She took me back through two sets of double doors, past the intake desk, to a small private examination room where a vet tech was sitting on the floor with the brindle Pit Bull beside her.

The Pit Bull was lying on his side on a soft blue blanket. The vet tech had a slip lead around his neck — gently, loose — and the old leather collar was sitting on the metal exam table beside her.

Daniela picked up the collar.

She said: “I want to show you what we found.”

She turned the collar over in her hands. She showed me the inside of it. The leather had been folded over on itself near the buckle, and stitched with what looked like dental floss. The fold was small. About an inch long.

She slid her thumb into the fold.

She pulled out a folded piece of cardboard.

The cardboard was about the size of a business card. It had been folded in half. It was creased and damp around the edges from months of being against a dog’s neck. She opened it carefully on the exam table.

The cardboard had been cut from the side of a cereal box. The plain inside of it had been written on with what looked like ballpoint pen.

The writing was small. It was in capital letters. It said:

HIS NAME IS MILO. HE IS THREE. HE WAS RAISED WITH A CAT NAMED PEPITA. I COULDN’T KEEP THEM. I LOST EVERYTHING. I AM SORRY. PEPITA IS BLACK AND WHITE WITH ONE NOTCHED EAR. PLEASE TRY TO KEEP THEM TOGETHER. PLEASE.

There was no signature.

There was no date.

There was no other information.

Daniela held the cardboard in her hand. She let me read it twice.

She said: “We see this sometimes. People who run out of options. They leave a note. They hope somebody finds it.”

I said, “Pepita.”

Daniela said, “The cat we have in kennel four is a tuxedo. She has a notched right ear.”

I said, “Where do you think they came from?”

Daniela said, “Could be anywhere. There’s a lot of people losing housing in this city right now, Mr. Castaño. Could’ve been somebody who lost a rental two months ago. Could’ve been somebody who’s been couch-surfing all winter. The person tried. They wrote it down. They left it in his collar in case somebody actually checked.”

She said, “Most people don’t actually check.”

I sat down on the small chair in the corner of the exam room.

The Pit Bull — Milo — lifted his head and looked at me.

His brown eyes were the color of weak tea. He was thin. He was tired. He was three years old and somebody had taught him, for the entire life he had lived so far, that food belonged to the cat first.

He had done that for forty-three nights behind my store.

He had done it because somebody had spent three years before that teaching him to.

Part 6

I am going to skip past the next two days because most of them were on the phone.

I called Lupita. I called my nephew. I called my older daughter Marisol, who is twenty-eight and lives in Rio Rancho and has been asking us for two years if we wanted to get a dog now that the kids were grown.

I called Daniela back on Tuesday afternoon.

I said: “We want to take them. Both of them.”

She said, “Mr. Castaño. Are you sure? Two animals is a lot. We have not had a Pit Bull-and-cat adoption together in my entire ten years at this office.”

I said, “I am sure.”

She said, “I’ll start the paperwork.”

The Animal Care Center has a policy about bonded pairs. Bonded pairs are animals — usually two dogs, sometimes two cats, almost never a dog and a cat — who came in together and have been observed to depend on each other emotionally. They are supposed to be adopted out together when possible. Most of the time, it is not possible. Most adopters do not want two animals. Most do not want a cat and a dog from the same household.

In Milo and Pepita’s case, the staff had observed something that confirmed the cardboard note within the first twenty-four hours.

Pepita had been placed in a quiet cat-only kennel in a separate building from the dog kennels. She had stopped eating. She had not eaten for almost two days. Daniela’s supervisor had decided, on the second morning, to bring her into the dog ward in a carrier — temporarily, against the usual protocol — and set the carrier in front of Milo’s kennel.

Pepita had walked out of the carrier.

She had walked through the chain-link of Milo’s kennel and pressed her body against his ribs.

She had started eating again.

She had eaten from his bowl, in his kennel, while he sat back and waited.

The staff had photographed it. Daniela showed me the photograph on her phone.

It was the same arrangement I had been watching on my security camera for six weeks. The cat at the food. The dog four feet away, head turned slightly to the side, waiting.

Part 7

We brought them home on a Saturday in early April.

Lupita had spent three days getting the back room ready. We had bought a dog bed for Milo and a cat tree for Pepita. We had bought two food bowls — one elevated for the dog, one regular for the cat. We had bought a litter box, a leash, a collar, a tag.

I had a new collar made for Milo at the pet store on Eubank.

It was a soft leather collar. Wide. Padded. With a brass tag.

The tag said his name. And it said, on the back: I LIVE WITH PEPITA.

We put the new collar on him in the parking lot of the Animal Care Center. I unbuckled the old leather one — the one with the cardboard note still folded inside, which I had asked Daniela if I could keep — and I put on the new one.

He stood very still while I did it.

The first night home, I put down a bowl of food in the kitchen for Milo. Pepita had her own bowl, in a different room, with kitten food the vet had recommended because she had been underweight.

Milo would not eat.

He stood next to his bowl. He looked at Pepita’s bowl. He looked at me.

Lupita said, “Reuben. He doesn’t know yet.”

I said, “I know.”

I brought Pepita’s bowl into the kitchen. I set it down about four feet from Milo’s bowl. Pepita came into the kitchen. She walked up to her own bowl. She started eating.

Milo watched her.

After about a minute, when she did not stop and did not look up, Milo lowered his head and he ate.

He ate his own food.

He ate slowly at first. He kept looking up. He kept checking. After about three nights of the two bowls side by side, he stopped checking.

After three weeks, he ate without looking up.

After six weeks, he ate first sometimes — sometimes before Pepita, sometimes after. The hierarchy had loosened. The job was done.

I have come to believe, watching them every evening in our kitchen, that Milo learned to eat last because somebody he loved had not had enough food. And that he had been holding that line for a long time after the person who taught him to hold it was no longer there.

He does not have to hold the line in our kitchen.

He is learning, slowly, that the food keeps coming.

Part 8

It has been ten months since we brought them home.

Milo weighs sixty-one pounds now. He has filled out. His ribs are not visible. His coat has gotten softer. He sleeps on a bed in our bedroom. Pepita sleeps on top of Milo most nights. She is eight pounds.

The Big Sky Mini Mart is still open. I still throw the unsold breakfast burritos behind the dumpster at the end of the morning shift. There are different strays now. I have not seen another brindle Pit Bull on the sidewalk across the street.

The old collar is in a small wooden box on the shelf in our living room.

The cardboard note is inside it.

I have read the note maybe forty times.

Every time I read it, the last word is the word that does it.

Please.

Whoever you were — whoever wrote those eight lines in ballpoint pen on the inside of a cereal box and folded them into the collar of a dog you had to let go of — you should know.

He kept them together.

You can stop carrying it.

We have them now.

Follow this page for more stories about the animals who carried something for somebody who could not carry it themselves.