I am pleased to announce that tonight Patches is back in my house where he is safe and sound. He was gone exactly one month to the day. He appeared at the back door and my roommate helped coax him back inside. He’s taking some time to readjust to his surroundings, but with some time I am sure he will be right back to how he was before. He seems to have been eating while he had been out, though he’s really pigging out on the cat food right now as I write this. He may need some time to get used to being around my other cat Hobbes, but I am confident they will adjust to each other’s presence.
Many thanks to everyone who expressed their concerns and offered their encouragement.
Anyway, a long time ago we had a male indoor/outdoor cat named Nagasua. One day he just turns up missing. We waited a few weeks, but he never came back and we assumed he was just gone.
Three months later, I open the door and Nagasua marches in like he owned the place, fat and sassy as ever. Damndest thing I’ve ever seen.
I found a cockatiel once (this was Florida) clambering around the baldcypresses in
my old backyard eating Spanish moss. A neighbor and I tried to coax her down,
including using a pool net, but had no success. Checking old classifieds turns out
a Hispanic couple on the northside (St. John’s River, about 25 miles from my house)
had lost a cockatiel about 6 months earlier. Well I called them to at least let them
know the bird was doing fine by herself even tho I was unable to recapture her.
In 1954, when I was six years old, my beloved cat Blackie was hit by a car. I found him bleeding and limping, and I ran into the house to ask my parents to take him to the vet. By the time we got outside to where Blackie had been, he’d disappeared. I was inconsolable.
In 1958, I heard a loud, caterwauling howl on the back porch. I looked out the window, and there was Blackie, looking well-fed and healthy. I yelled to my mother “Blackie is back! Blackie is back!” She said “No, honey, it can’t be Blackie. It must be a cat that just looks like Blackie.”
But it really was Blackie. He had a distinctive voice and two little holes in his left ear, and he hated dolls (he’d attack them and try to tear them up). Yep, this was Blackie, all right. Where he’d been for those four missing years, we never knew. He stayed around until 1970, when his kidneys failed.
Blackie knew his way home. It just took him a really long time to get there.
John DiFool (or anyone, really), you’re welcome to start a new thread on the same topic and link to this thread, but since this one is over two years old, I officially curse it as a zombie and close it down.