The Cellar - I FOUND THE CAT!

Yours is still gone, cloud? i'm sorry.

This one wasn't even mine -she's the mother of my cats and I was feeding her and her other son while my friend is away.

She's a tiny Siamese (7lb) and frequently goes "missing" More than once she has gotten herself "adopted" by well meaning people who think she looks thin so must be homeless, so take her in and don't let her out again. She is microchipped (and now collared and tagged too). Sometimes she finds a way across the river at the bottom of the yard and can't seem to get back. She's al;so gotten herself locked in a garge for three days.

So, she didn't come home Monday evening. no panic.. Not even the first time on my watch. Not Tuesday morning, but last night was three nights, I had searched all over and asked all the usual people and nothing, so i had to contact her owners and they emailed me a poster with a picture to put up. I printed out several copies and this morning went over, hoping the act of printing the posters would invoke sod's law and she'd be home already. But nope.

So I went round on my bike, flyering the street and putting one in each lobby of all the apartment blocks across the river where she gets herself stuck and/or adopted. No-one had seen her for a few days.

I had one flyer left to put in the last apartment block when there was a god-almighty cat fight just outside the block i was heading for her. Of course it would be just too convenient for it to be her, but I had to check it out and lo and behold it was. there she was, treed by a much bigger cat whose is apparently named "sugar" and is a nasty piece of work. Sugar's neighbot also had a cat and the lovely young man shoed Sugar away and then went to get some food to tempt Bluebelle down.

She wasn't having it, but was meowing like crazy. so I decided to take her picture -if there's one thing guaranteed to get a cat to move it's trying to take it's picture. I couldn't believe it when she started to move. The food came, and she seemed interested in that too, but she was pretty scared and it was a hard tree to climb down. She could've jumped at this point, but I don't think she knew that. Anyway, I climbed up onto the car port roof and soon I could grab her. I had to drage her out of the tree by the scruff of her neck and her collar, but once I got her i cuddled her and she calmed. then the UPS truck screeched by and she freaked. So there I am, a mile from "home" as the human walks (along a busy commercial street), with a frightened wriggly cat.

So I used my super duper bike bags -special huge, zippered ones that started to look amazingly like pet carriers once I had realized it was her in the tree, so fortunately i had already emptied one just in case. I wrestled her in -there was plenty of room for her, she's so small and they're so big, zipped her up and was about to leave when a "helpful" resident openined his window and yold me she's not a stray, she lives around the apartment blocks. So I had to "chat" to him for a while to convince him i wasn't catnapping, and then off we went.

Uneventful ride back, closed the door, unzipped the bag and out she popped like she'd never been away. But boy was she hungry. i don't know where she's been -I'm pretty sure she wasn't up that tree when I went searching yesterday, but she certainly hadn't been fed recently. She's normally very fussy and eats only a little, but she wolfed everything in sight.

I popped back a couple of hours later and she was as right as rain.

Here she is, up the tree, starting to come down, and home and hungry.