Dec 8th, 2015
Last week’s drama
We found out he was missing in the early morning, while getting ready for school and work. In the early afternoon we posted about him in our neighborhood online group, and I made a flyer to distribute to our nearest neighbors.
One neighbor put us in touch with a friend of hers who is very good at finding lost cats and dogs. Seriously, she’s like a cat whisperer with magic powers. Brenda stopped by our house that evening, explained some cat behavior stuff to us (which culminated in her firm belief that “he is almost certainly within one house of this one, probably hunkered down under a deck or a bush”), and gave us some suggestions (and some extra-stinky cat food) for luring him back home.
On the front porch, we put some of our clothes (with our smells on them), one of the litter boxes, Widdershins’ favorite sleeping pillow, and some of the stinky cat food. The hope was that he’d follow those familiar odors home.
We also left a cat-sized opening in our back slider door and planted another bowl of the stinky food just beyond it. And to provide another option for shelter, we left the garage door open about six inches and put yet more cat food in the garage. And then we went to bed.
Around 5 a.m. I heard some meowing outside my closed bedroom door. (We had our other cat, Aisling, locked in our room with us so she wouldn’t run out through the open slider door.) Sure enough, it was Mr. Widdershins! His thirty-six-hour-long adventure had concluded, and he’d come home. Needless to say, there was much rejoicing here!
P.S. Of course he ate ALL of the stinky cat food we’d left out for him, first. (I am pretty sure the 5 a.m. meowing was him saying, “I want more food.”) We just knew that his hunger would bring him home!