The Lost Cats of Poverty Gulch

Pete Morisseau is a burly man with an intimidating face. His head is square; his grip firm; his shoulders broad. He looks like the type of guy you'd want on the front lines of a barroom brawl, on the football field, or in a Middle Eastern firefight. He does not, however, look like the sort of guy whose heart turns to goo at the sight of a kitty cat—but that's exactly the sort of guy Morisseau is.

Morisseau and his wife, Erin, are "both big cat people," he says. "We each had a cat while we were single, and when we moved in together [in Erin's] condo on Avalon [Way, in West Seattle], it was two people and two cats cramped into a small space."

In January 2006, the Morisseaus purchased a large home near Longfellow Creek, a lush, wooded area that contains a miles-long trail that runs parallel to Delridge Way, a West Seattle thoroughfare that winds through a valley formerly known as Poverty Gulch. Here, the Morisseaus' existence is as pristine and isolated as life can be in Seattle. On their street, they only have one neighbor, and their house is surrounded on three sides by green space. Where the Morisseaus live could easily be confused for a riverside thicket in Louisiana. On a sensory level, it is worlds removed from downtown Seattle, when in fact it is but a 10-minute drive across the Duwamish away.

"One of the benefits of living here is you're able to retreat into your own personal world," says Morisseau. "We don't talk to anybody. We're like hillbillies."

Shortly after they moved into their new home, Pete bought Erin a third cat for Valentine's Day. It was a purebred Russian Blue kitten that he'd had shipped from a breeder in Kansas. Erin named him Sacha, and he "quickly became a key part of our family," says Pete.

In November 2007, the Morisseaus decided to take a road trip through the American South, culminating in a friend's wedding in Mobile, Alabama. As usual, they hired a housesitter to take care of their cats. One morning this caretaker left for work before sunrise, and Sacha escaped. When Sacha didn't return that evening, the sitter began canvassing the neighborhood, visiting shelters, and posting notices online—all in the hope of retrieving Sacha before the Morisseaus returned.

His efforts would prove unsuccessful. When the Morisseaus got back from their trip and realized Sacha was missing, they covered the neighborhood's telephone poles with hundreds of posters containing Sacha's photo and their contact information. Sacha wore no collar, but he did have an identifying microchip embedded beneath his skin, and the Morisseaus sent flyers to every veterinary clinic in the area, asking them to scan the microchip of any purebred Russian Blue male who might wander through their doors.

For at least a month after Sacha's disappearance, the Morisseaus dutifully journeyed to various animal shelters, looking for their lost cat. These visits are what Pete terms "the hardest part about the experience."

"No trip to an animal shelter is a pleasant one; it would be naive to expect otherwise," says Pete. "But it's hard to prepare yourself for how mentally exhausting it is to keep going back. The county shelter [in Kent] reeks of urine, and each time you visit you have to fight the urge to bring a new cat home. Some cats are subdued. Some seem to know what's going on, desperate to make a connection with any human that walks by. Those are the hardest."

Sacha has yet to be found, and probably never will be. But the Morisseaus got in touch with Sacha's breeder in Kansas, and last week welcomed the cat's brother, Boris, into their home.

The Morisseaus' efforts to retrieve Sacha may have been exceptional, but their plight hardly is. Over the past year, it has been difficult to find a telephone pole on the streets which run adjacent to Longfellow and Puget Creeks that doesn't contain at least one flyer signaling the disappearance of a domestic cat. These hand-stapled pleas for help contain details and photos of cats named Yoshi, Pip, Estelle, Rocky, and Garbanzo—who left his Longfellow Creek home on August 15, the day his owners arrived from Lansing, Mich., to start a new life.

"[Garbanzo] was a brutal specimen, despite being rather small. He would kill just about anything," says Garbanzo's owner, Mike Forsyth. "The neighbors said they saw him about a week after [he left], but I haven't had any luck. It's like a jungle in West Seattle."

"We do get a lot of [missing cat reports] from West Seattle," says Don Jordan, executive director of the city-run Seattle Animal Shelter in Interbay. "There's just so much habitat over there," he adds, referring to the peninsula's abundance of greenery.

In talking to the owners of these cats, all of whom are believed to be dead at this point, a common suspected killer emerges: the coyote, which has thrived in the Delridge corridor far longer than either cats or humans. Like the early settlers, these non-native species are drawn to Delridge by the prospects of affordable home ownership and space to raise a family in. They come undeterred by the presence of urban wildlife in the area's manifold greenbelts, the lack of sidewalks, or the fact that every fourth home on each street is an architectural abomination. They come in spite of Delridge's reputation—though that's improved markedly this century—as one of the city's more hardscrabble strips.