Spoiler: kitten is fine
[Image: kitten inside the engine block of an old Yaris.]
Our Saturday morning started rather more stressfully than we would have liked. After waking me up at 5:30 AM with the usual assault on my toes, one of the kittens vanished before I could blearily rouse myself and head downstairs for the gooshy food distribution.
We tried not to panic, searching every room methodically with torches and opening all the cupboards, boxes and drawers, but it soon became evident that Astro was no longer in the house. Cue a flurry of activity: adults flinging on clothes and trying to calm the distraught Humuhumu so she could join the search outside, Keiki channeling his anxiety into mass producing "help, lost black kitten" posters with many enthusiastic but questionably accurate renderings of Astro.
After an hour or so of walking up and down and around the house shaking a packet of Dreamies, and its environs, enlisting the help of most of our neighbours, who are all early risers and / or dog walkers, I heard an angry mewing quite close to the house. At first I thought it came from the hedgerow. Cue a furious battle with wildflowers and stinging nettles, to no avail. I was certain the irregular mewing was coming from inside the car, a suspicion finally confirmed the second time the bonnet was lifted and a pair of yellow eyes stared at us from the beneath a tangle of pipes.
The next hour was spent trying to convince him to either pop enough of himself out through the pipes to be grabbed, or make his way out the opening underneath the car which he'd obviously used to get there in the first place. Efforts failed until suddenly the bloke remembered the magic power of tuna. The kittens had never had tuna (or Dreamies, for that matter) so we weren't certain it would work. But I ran in and opened a tin, spooned some into a bowl and placed it strategically offset from where we thought the secret entrance was.
It worked. The little darling trotted to the back of the engine block and squeezed out. He was caught before he could eat any tuna, which probably didn't improve his mood. He forgot all about his grump and his misadventure once he was safely back indoors and the tuna reappeared. The same could not be said for his humans, whose nerves continued to jangle for several hours afterwards.
Butter wouldn't melt.