In the summer of 2009, we caught five raccoons over a period of about a month using a live trap. I would shove the trap and raccoon in the back on my car, drive it two miles and across a freeway to a lake with acres of wilderness and release it. These were five fewer creatures to eat Susan’s garden on our upper deck.

After setting the trap with a piece of chicken one night, I came down to the patio the next morning to find that instead of catching a raccoon, we caught a kitten. This cat could fit in the palms of two hands held together.

The last two inches of its tail was caught as the door slammed shut, and it dangled, broken and bloody. The emaciated cat, not much more than skin and bones, huddled in the smallest ball it could, dwarfed by the overly large trap.

Susan took one look at it and said, “Oh my God, we broke it! Now we own it!”

$400 later, the tip of the tail was removed, the end sewn up and the cat neutered. The vet estimated the cat to be 2-3 years old, but its size suggested less than 1 year. It weighed about three pounds and all you felt was bone when you rubbed over her soft fur.

In keeping with our theme of scientists names, we selected a woman scientist who never got the recognition she should have. We named the cat for Rosalind Franklin, who Watson and Crick allude to in their book, The Double Helix, was just as responsible for the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.

She is now Rosalind Franklin Bogatin, which, also in keeping with the other animals, we shorten to Roz, when we are lazy.

We imagine the cat was raised in a home and then ended up somehow in our back wilderness area. She probably had not eaten much in the last month and might not have lasted another week. It was not pregnant nor ever had been, she had no fleas or ticks and didn’t have any scars from fights. She probably was not out alone for very long.

We kept her in the bathroom and fed her by hand for four weeks. She acted like a young feral cat with a dim memory of humans. We  watched her struggle between the emotions of fear and hunger as she slowly overcame her fear to eat off our fingers.

Eventually, she graduated from hunger to curiosity and then to socializing. After a week of letting us pet her while she ate, she began to come over to us wanting to be pet. For three weeks, she devoured four cans of cat food a day and almost doubled in size.

After four weeks confined to the bathroom, she was ready to meet the other cats. Surprisingly, she took to Schrodinger like he was her long lost older bother. She adored him, followed him around and rubbed up against him. And, uncharacteristically for him, he tolerated her and was even friendly.

It took another week of her persistence and patience to win over Maxwell. He started out hissing and yelling at the new cat, but within a week they were family.

It is remarkable that this young, feral cat accepted our family as her own in just a few weeks and actively worked at winning over every family member until now Rosalind thinks that we are all part of her family.