I make any claims to storytelling skills, but this one deserves to be told, so here goes.
For those of you who may not pay attention to the weather systems over New England, we had a nice snow storm here in Boston last Friday. I got out of work early, got home around mid-afternoon, and decided to take a nap.
Half an hour later, one of my roommates opened the door. “Have you seen Pickle?” he asked. (Pickles several months older than that now, but still cute.)
“Huh? Uh, no. Actually, I didn’t see him at all this morning, either.”
“I haven’t seen him all day, and I can’t find him in any of the rooms. I think we have a situation.”
I got on some warm clothes and boots and headed outside. At least it’d stopped snowing.
Pickle and his brother, Cricket, are indoor cats. My roommates have let them out for short times under supervision, but they’ve never been outside for longer than half an hour. Did I mention that it had been snowing heavily all day? And I’m the first one out of the house in the morning, so if I didn’t see him then, he’d probably escaped when my roommates got home, late, the night before. But Pickle had gone missing before, only to turn up in the basement rafters. I went inside and did a thorough search of the basement; my roommate had already opened all the doors in the house. No luck in the basement, so I went back outside.
My roommate talked to the neighbors, who were out shoveling snow. He walked all around the house clinking together the bowls that the cats get their 7:30 pm tuna out of every night. The sound of a clinking tuna bowl in the kitchen will bring a cat stampeding down from the third floor on a regular night, and found an escaped cat once before.
I started looking under things. The back porch, then the front porch. Bushes, cars. No luck. My roommate thought he saw Pickle on the roof of the neighbor’s porch, but it turned out to be a squirrel. The light was fading, and have you ever tried to find a black cat at night? If he’d been out all the night before and through the snowstorm, I doubted our chances of finding him at all. Feeling that I wasn’t helping the search any, and that someone ought to do something about the eight inches of snow in the driveway, I started shoveling while my roommate continued to walk around, clinking.
Our other roommate got home from classes around 7 pm and continued the search. We ate a very quiet dinner with Cricket, who kept crying in his high-pitched voice and was much cuddlier than normal. “Where’s your brother?” we kept asking him, but he didn’t say. My roommates continued to take turns walking around outside, clinking. They posted an add on Cragislist. Both cats have collars with tags and are microchipped, so if anyone found him, he would probably be returned. But secretly, we later confessed to each other, we didn’t really think he would be found.
I went to bed, and my roommates pulled out the sleeper sofa on the first floor and set the alarm. They planned to take turns going out every hour to search. They didn’t go to bed until 1 a.m., but they’d forgotten to turn the alarm on, so they didn’t wake up until about 5 a.m. One of them went out, then the other, at 6. At about 6:30, I woke up, heard them whispering and the back door opening and closing. I thought I heard the words, “Found him,” but I brushed it off, assuming my ears were playing tricks on me. If they’d found him, they wouldn’t bother whispering. Still, they kept moving around, so I got up to get a glass of water and find out if there was any news. I opened the door and found them at the end of the hallway, holding Pickle wrapped in a towel.
“We found him!”
When my roommate walked around clinking tuna bowls at 6:15 in the morning, Pickle finally called out. He was under the tarps that adorn the back of the neighbor’s house and yard. My roommate had to dig him out of the snow and cut a hole through two layers of platic tarp to get him out.
We gave him a sponge bath (no need for the further trama of a full bath, we thought) and took him up to my roommates room, where he finished cleaning himself and I heard the rescue story. Only Cricket failed to welcome the runaway. Cricket, indeed, didn’t recognize his brother at all, but seemed scared of the “new” cat, and even hissed at him. It wasn’t until Sunday night that Cricket started bathing Pickle, as he’s done since they were kittens. Pickle doesn’t seem to’ve suffered any lasting damage, and the very next day made a move towards the front door when I didn’t close it quickly enough. Kitten Checks are now routine whenever someone comes in the door and before bed. Oh, and when my roommate and I went grocery shopping on Saturday, we bought two new tarps for the neighbors.
