You guys have met my cat right?
Let’s just say she’s an indoor cat who doesn’t possess very many “street smarts.” And she’s not much of a hunter, judging by her 25% success ratio with catching flies and moths. Also, she’s not very fast. Or motivated.
Well we had some people over for a potluck/campfire/get-together type thing. The cat was around most of the evening, hiding behind the end table and generally looking pissed about all the people who had invaded her space, although she would sometimes disappear and I would find her wandering in the garage or eating out of the dog’s food dish, etc.
The next morning, I got up and started reading a book on my new Kindle. After about an hour or so, I realized the cat had not yet come up to greet me and snuggle on my lap while I read. This was unusual.
I searched. And searched. And searched. The cat was nowhere to be found in the house, the backyard or the immediate neighborhood. Chris helped me look. Nothing.
Finally, we had to just wait it out… eventually she’d get hungry and come home, right? She never wanders far, as she’s petrified of the outdoors (other than eating the grasses that grow near the house) and there’s really no food out there. That she knows of.
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Chris suggested I try the neighbors. Their dog had been barking nonstop since we had gotten up, and usually we almost never heard the dog. The thought had also occurred to me that perhaps the dog was barking at my cat, so I put on some shoes and headed over to meet my neighbors.
The neighbor, after he had established that I actually lived next door and wasn’t just some freak show who wanted to wander around in his backyard for reasons unknown, became much friendlier and let me take a look-see in the backyard. But not without first inferring that if the cat actually were in their backyard, the dog wouldn’t just be barking at it, the dog would have eaten it and dragged the carcass to their back door as a belated Christmas present. He didn’t say that in so many words, of course, but that was the gist. Thanks, neighbor.
There was no cat in the backyard and, dejected, I wandered back to the house and attempted to finish reading my book.
About an hour later, the doorbell rings. It’s the neighbor.
“This cat of yours, does it have green eyes? And longish red fur?”
“Yes!” I cried, barely letting him get his sentence out.
“I think we found her. Hiding under our car in the driveway.”
Which explained why the dog had been barking all day… the cat was clearly visible through the fence in her “hiding” spot underneath their car, but could not actually be reached by the dog, due to the fence separating them. And, judging by how long the dog had been barking, the cat had been under there for at least a solid four hours. (Why she didn’t just run to our house – which happened to be in the opposite direction of the barking dog – I don’t know. I can only speculate that she was petrified with fear.)
As the neighbor and his daughter walked back to their house, I heard the daughter mutter good-naturedly under her breath, “maybe now that dog of ours will shut up.”
And it did. We didn’t hear a peep out of that dog for the rest of the day.
The cat, however, was filthy. So she got a bath. Which she did not like very much. (Her head looks very tiny when you wet down all the fluff and are left with just the fat cats).
She’s forgiven me by now, but for the rest of the day we were treated to “angry cats”:
Which didn’t stop her from jumping on our laps and snuggling (as you can see). She just looked pissed off about it the whole time.
