the prodigal cat
Originally published at ravnsdaughter. You can comment here or there.
It’s been a bit of an emotional week around here, especially the last few days. Good emotions… really good ones, but emotional nonetheless.
About 5 or 6 months ago (I don’t know the exact date because apparently I never mentioned it on Facebook), one of my cats slipped out of the house while I was cleaning and taking the trash out. That was not an unusual occurrence - my cats slip out regularly but I always get them back in promptly. This time that wasn’t the case. He completely disappeared, and despite all the searching, posting ads, and so forth that I did, he remained missing. I had reports of sightings, and even saw a cat that I was sure was him once, and then followed him when he took off, talked to the resident of the home he was hanging around, tried to trap him, and on and on… with no luck.
And then, on Thursday while I was at work, I see my iPhone’s screen lighting up. It was on silent, but for some reason I picked up when I saw that it was actually ringing. And there was a woman on the other end saying “I think I have your cat”. Cue my jaw hitting the desk.
She said she feeds and shelters all of the neighbourhood strays, and had actually caught him last night and had a look. She saw his tattoo, so she looked through the local SPCA’s Facebook page, and saw my post. She was able to get ahold of him again that evening, and brought him home to me around 6:30. I almost didn’t recognize him at first - he’d gained weight, and put on a lush, fluffy winter coat. But once I had a look at his tattoo, it was obviously him. Sadly I had to rush off to band practice, so after snapping a couple of pictures (I needed proof for the gushy Facebook post I knew I was going to make), I took him upstairs and set him down on the bed, and he immediately took off under it.
Friday night, he finally came out and I got some quality snuggle time with him at 4 in the morning. Of course, I was so happy that he’s home that I didn’t even care about the time. Once the sun came up and I got a chance to look him over, I discovered he had a wound on his front right leg. I’d noticed a couple of scabs when I picked him up when he first came home, but didn’t notice the extent of it until Saturday afternoon. He almost looked to me like he might have broken his leg at one time, though if it was, it was fully healed, as there was no movement in the bone and he wasn’t acting like it hurt. But then something popped open and started oozing… so off to the vet we went. I had wanted him to have a good check-up by a vet anyways, so this worked to do double duty. Thankfully, the vet said that other than the wound everything looked fine, and the wound was obviously the result of him getting into a fight with another animal and standing his ground. He was well along in the healing process, though, and healing quite well. He gave him a dose of antibiotics just to be safe, and a deworming pill, since he’s been eating goodness-knows-what for 6 months. Then we were on our merry way!
Onyx is my one cat who is petrified of the dog, so he’s been sitting on the shelf in the den closet since we got home yesterday. He’s got food, water and a litterbox up there, so he’s fine… it’s going to take him a while to get used to living inside again, I think. Later today, I will put the dog somewhere else in the house and then coax him down for some snuggling. But no matter where in the house he’s hiding, I am SO happy to have my Onyx home!