While Elfriede Milburn works through the next few weeks, don’t be surprised if it sounds like she is meowing. She’s not, it’s just the tiny kitten in her pocket.

To be more exact, it’s often in Milburn’s fannie pack. The kitten doesn’t like to be alone, meowing interminably when not in someone’s hands or with Milburn in her comfortable pocket. But when held close, the 10-12-day-old kitten will purr. Very few things are as comforting as a content kitten.

Finding her way to the Moyer Animal Shelter was very lucky. She wouldn’t have lived long in a wall at a nearby construction site. One of the workers heard it meowing and went digging to find it. He found the tiny little kitten with no mother or siblings in sight after an exhaustive search.

The worker brought the kitten to the shelter and Milburn jumped into service as a surragate mother. Barb Muecke already had two very young kittens under her care and another volunteer had three kittens to hand feed every two to three hours. The employees and volunteers expect kittens to be brought in through the summer months, but that doesn’t make it any easier. They toil through nights of broken sleep until the kittens are about 6 weeks old. Then they add them to their already overpopulated facility.

While there are currently only six dogs at the shelter — down from 15 earlier this year — they have more than two dozen cats looking for permanent homes. Most of the cats will make fine pets. Others are looking for a job keeping mice out of a cozy barn; now sterilized to keep feral cat populations down.

The animals need a little extra help from the community. The shelter is in desperate need of kitty litter despite a recent generous donation of pet food by Walmart in Cody. Working on a tight budget, they could also use paper towels.

The shelter does all it can to rehome the pets and several of the employees and volunteers have already taken in animals, most of which the staff would have had a hard time finding new homes. Milburn already has a three-legged cat named Speedy.

“You miss your mom, don’t you,” she said as Pocket continued to cry out. “Who knows where [your mother] is. She might be dead.”

At 86, Milburn has done it all to save unwanted pets. She was born in Germany in 1938. Though young at the time she remembers World War II.

“You don't forget hiding in the cellar when the sirens blew. And then the Americans came,” she claps back to the question.

Eventually she met a very shy soldier in the U.S. Army stationed at Ansbach, Germany. They married and he brought her back to Wyoming.

“I didn’t even know where Wyoming was at the time,” she said, trusting the former Powell mayor to show her a new way of life.

James (his friends called him Jim) died six years ago, about a decade after Elfriede could have retired. She co-founded the animal shelter at the age of 60, after spending years nurturing animals needing special care back to health that people would bring to her at the couple’s home. She has no intention of quitting now, she said.

“This is what I do,” she said.

The staff names every animal that comes to the Moyer that doesn’t already have one. There are so many they work off of a list of names — except for her current clamorous kitten, which she calls Pocket.

“We kind of run out our names, you know, because we don't want to repeat what's here,” she said.

At 1-2 weeks-old when brought in, kittens don’t always have the best chance to survive, she said. Yet, Milburn is always hopeful.

“She’s strong. She’ll survive,” she said in a thick and determined German accent.

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