CORINNA – Laurie Mountain hasn’t slept much since Monday night and all she had eaten Thursday were two cold egg rolls.

Mountain said she’s too worried about finding every last one of the felines that were dropped off near her house on Bolstridge Road – a long dirt road that leads to four houses.

A neighbor came to Mountain’s house Monday night and said there were cats all over the road, sitting on snowbanks and in the woods.

“There was a sea of orange cats running all over the road in front of my driveway,” Mountain said.

She assumes that someone dropped the cats off near her home because they know that she does animal rescue volunteer work. Mountain and her husband grabbed all the cat carriers they had in the house and got to work.

“We threw dry food in the road,” Mountain said. “It was like feeding chickens. They were just running around grabbing it like crazy.”

The cats don’t appear to be malnourished, but are very hungry, she said.

The first half-dozen were caught fairly easily, and later that night Mountain headed out again.

“We could see eyeballs all through the woods,” she said.

Mountain has caught a few more of the cats since the first night, but is worried because she has no idea how many are out there. She found a discarded box with cat litter in the ditch down the road.

“I think the owner should be in trouble for this, but we need to know how many to look for,” Mountain said. “Instead of making calls to anybody and trying to find some help, they brought them out in the middle of nowhere … and they dumped them out here.”

Usually Mountain said rescue organizations and shelters see some kind of reprieve around this time of year, but “times are tough and because of the high prices we aren’t seeing that let up.”

Workers at The Animal Orphanage in Old Town are saying the same thing.

The organization is down in donations and people aren’t adopting because of the cost, Margaret Baker said Thursday from the shelter.

“In the last week, we’ve had a cat brought in every day just about,” Baker said.

Mountain said they’ve seen mostly cats in need of help.

“Foster homes are overflowing right now with cats of all sizes and shapes and colors,” she said. “Shelters are overwhelmed and overrun because of people giving up their animals.”

High heat costs, gas prices, and foreclosures are the most-noted reasons for people giving up their pets, Mountain said.

“Every day it’s something new,” she said. “There’s 23 cats and one dog this week that just I have been asked to help.”

What she would like most right now is a phone call or e-mail saying exactly how many cats were dumped in the woods near her home.

So far she has been able to catch eight orange-and-white cats, a calico and one black-and-white cat.

“We can hear meowing,” Mountain said. “We know for certain we’ve actually [seen] two more.”

The group appears to include an older male and female who possibly are the parents of two litters of kittens that are 7 to 12 months old.

“I want to know how many they really dumped off so that I don’t have to do this the rest of the winter,” Mountain said. “I’m going to be driving home for the rest of my life looking in the woods for orange cats.”

To adopt one of the cats mentioned or offer a foster home, or to let Mountain know how many cats were dropped off on her road, call 278-2175 or 991-1806, or e-mail mtn@tdstelme.net.

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