The Prodigal Cat Returns

The cat is back!
My son Mike called me when I was browsing the Suffern Furniture closing sale Sunday to let me know our cat Atticus had returned after vanishing outside ten days ago.
We are not cat people. The cat adopted us.
In mid-September, my 17-year-old son Tom had heard determined meowing outside his bedroom window. When we investigated, we found that a kitten had taken up residence behind a shed that sits against the house by the side door to the basement.
We shone a flashlight into the crevice and saw the kitten’s eyes staring at us. We meowed and the cat meowed back.
We bought cat food and kitty litter at the A&P. We began leaving food for the cat in a dish outside the shed. We angled the dish so that we could watch from a window in our dining room and see the cat eating.
But the kitten was extremely skittish and ran away when we ventured near. Even when the cat was eating, she would feel our eyes upon her, turn around and then skedaddle back into the shed.
Once I surprised her climbing in a tree. She made a mad leap from six feet up in the tree to the shed.
Another time my husband Jim saw her playing with squirrels. I say “her” now, but at that point we couldn’t tell whether she was male or female. My daughter Maeve named her Atticus after a character in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” My son Matt and his then-fiancé Melany came one Sunday and sat outside the shed, waiting for a glimpse of the cat. Melany comes from cat people.
For a couple of days in October, Atticus seemed to have vanished. Her nests in and around the shed were empty when we shone the flashlight in. So we didn’t put out her food. Then she walked up the steps to the back deck, meowing insistently to express her hunger. She ran away when we opened the kitchen door, but we got the message. We put her food out.
By December, it was starting to get cold, and we worried about Atticus surviving in frigid weather. (Although Jim’s brother Kevin’s fiancé Cindi – a true cat lover with four cats of her own--- said feral cats seemed to be able to survive in the cold.)
About two weeks before Christmas, with a combination of “meowing” and a bowl of food, Jim (who thinks of himself as a cat whisperer) succeeded in getting Atticus to scamper through the open front door. She still wouldn’t let us near her. But she took over the house, going everywhere but the kitchen, where the dogs were ensconced. She quickly learned to go in the kitty litter, but also liked to poop in the houseplants on the front staircase landing. (Melany’s mom Susan –a true cat expert—suggested putting ground black pepper into the houseplant soil to deter the cat, but that didn’t seem to work.)
We’d wake up in the middle of the night to find Atticus standing over us in bed or curled in the crook of our knees. If I were writing out checks for bills on the dining room table, she would come and sit on the table and watch me. If I were doing laundry in the basement, she would materialize down there, somehow getting through the back hall with its open door to the kitchen and the ferocious dogs.
She loved to run in front of you when you were walking down the stairs, running with loud and heavy footfalls for a 5-pound cat. She loved to run and chase balls down our long second-floor hallway. She ran like a squirrel.
As she settled in, we bought cat toys, a couple of fluffy mats for a bed, a scratching post and a carrier (pink, it was the only small carrier left at PETCO) for the day when we could bring her to the veterinarian.
A week or two after she came indoors, we managed to get her into the carrier and take her to the vet. The vet did a quick check and announced, “It’s a girl.” Atticus tested negative for feline leukemia and feline AIDS. We had her spayed the next day. (My neighbor Mei Ling, a nuanced animal lover, had begged me – even if we didn’t adopt the cat—to have her spayed before returning her to the wild.)
The vet felt that the cat---estimated to be 6 or 7 months old – had probably been a house kitten in her early months, because she seemed comfortable around people.
Jim, an avowed dog-lover, had a soft spot for the cat. I would find him laughing over her in the bedroom some nights. Maeve would cradle and kiss the cat with all the pent-up intensity of an adolescent. Tom had contradictory feelings: He would meow at the cat, but also was distressed when the cat peed on his bed.
And then, after all the snow and the freezing temperatures of this winter, came two days of delicious warmth (in the fifties and sixties) on February 16th and 17th. I brought the dogs out to romp in the warmth, and it seemed a shame to imprison Atticus indoors. I opened the front door and let her out. She moved a couple of steps out onto the porch, hesitated and then tried to run back inside. But I had shut the door. She scampered down the steps and around the side of the house.
And that was the last we saw of her.
Temperatures dropped to 14 degrees. It snowed six inches on top of at least a foot of frozen snow. Had she fallen through and been trapped in the snow? We shone the flashlight in and around the shed where she had previously taken shelter. No cat.
We would walk onto the front porch and meow suggestively. No response.
We put out Meow Mix, angling the bowl of food so that we could see from the dining room window. The food was gone by next day, but we never saw the cat. Jim said the squirrels had eaten the food.
We saw tiny footprints in the snow, four paw-like spherical impressions. Jim said they were squirrel footprints.
My daughter Maeve blamed me for losing the cat and I blamed myself. Jim said he would have let the cat out under the same circumstances.
I just thought we had established some bond with the cat and she would have come back. When our dogs escaped, they always came back. True, when Duke (our Border Collie mix) was younger, he might range far and wide, and 8-year-old Tom would be chasing him through snowy backyards. The very agile Fella (our Rhodesian Ridgeback mix) escaped every day for a while last year –he could jump up an 8-foot-high stone wall and land on top – but he would just run around the perimeter of the house and wait patiently on the deck until I opened the kitchen door.
Jim thought another family had found Atticus and taken her in.
“But how could that be?” I said. “You couldn’t get close enough to her to get her inside.”
Melany, by now Matt’s wife, said that one of her cats would sometimes disappear for two days at a time. Jim talked to a work friend who seems to be a cat hoarder (10 cats) who told him cats could disappear for 10 days to two weeks.
“So is the cat an indoor cat or an outdoor cat?” Jim asked the work friend.
“Well, if the cat disappears for two weeks when you let it outside, I guess it’s an indoor cat,” the friend replied.
My husband has unresolved grief issues which tend to make him jump to the worst conclusions. When the possibility arose a couple of years back that Duke had ingested rat poison, Jim just said,”He’ll be dead by the morning” and continued eating his dinner.(Instead of concurring, Matt took Duke to the vet, who stuffed the dog full of charcoal to absorb any poisons and vitamin K to promote clotting. Duke lived, although I think he hadn’t actually eaten any rat poison.)
So I think my husband really thought the cat was dead or lost to us forever. Within days of Atticus’ disappearance, Jim fed the dogs all the canned cat food he himself had bought for Atticus ( a rare thing and a sign of Jim’s devotion because Jim doesn’t buy pet food, or human food, for that matter).
The rest of us still harbored hope. On Saturday, Maeve dug through the snow and found a metal pet gate that we had stored outside. She set it up in a corner of the porch. On Sunday morning, I bought more canned cat food. Maeve dumped a can into a bowl and set it inside the fenced-in area. A little while later, she saw Atticus pawing at the gate and meowing with hunger. Mike ran out the kitchen door and around the side of the house to track the cat if she bolted. The cat ran into nearby bushes. Maeve grabbed the bowl of food and lured the cat back inside.
As I write, the cat is getting a little shut-eye on his fluffy mats. (His tail is stirring slightly:Is he dreaming of running with the squirrels?) It is as if the disappearance never happened. (Although with the wisdom of recent experience, we will now take the cat out only on a leash, something our vet does with her cats.)
Jim thinks the cat’s whiskers have grown exponentially during her sabbatical (sa-cattical?) And the cat seems to have gotten bolder toward the dogs. The door to the kitchen remains firmly shut, but Atticus sticks her paw under the door, full well knowing that barkers (maybe biters) reside there. And Duke, whose new position is as sentinel on the other side of the door and whose new goal is to kill the cat, sits mesmerized when he sees that disembodied cat paw flailing around under his nose.
I guess we have become cat people.