The cat that came back
The last post I wrote was when my Grandad died, and that still hurts, and I still think about him a lot and haven’t quite known what to write since then, but I wanted to write something, so here is something that isn’t a sad post. It’s a happy one. Happy and a little bit strange.
If you’re a member of neighbourhood Facebook groups, or a member of a neighbourhood, you’ll have seen missing cat posters, missing cat posts. It happens so frequently. Cats get stuck in garages, or they get injured in a fight and hide under bushes, or they try and make their way to a previous home and get lost, or - the story we like to tell ourselves - they find their way to the doorstep of a little old lady who feeds them and pampers them for the rest of their long, happy life. When my cat Horatio went missing in 2019, I didn’t make any posters, because I wasn’t in town, so I hoped the latter had happened to him.
Let me rewind, and then we’ll fast forward to the happy bit (I promise this isn’t a sad missing cat story).
Horatio had lived in our house near the Botanic Gardens for his whole life, after we adopted him as a kitten. When he was three years old, we moved, along with our kitten, Juniper, and our puppy, Scoresby. It wasn’t far, just to Aro Valley. I kept the cats inside for two weeks as per the standard wisdom. When I opened the doors to give them freedom, Juniper immediately started exploring outside, and she returned, and went out again, and returned. All as it should be. Tick.
Horatio didn’t go outside for another week. The doors were open, he chose not to go through them. Then he went outside, and didn’t come back.
We were a little worried, but not overly so. Figured he’d come back the next day, or soon enough when he got hungry. It was around that time that I went to Auckland for a week’s training for my new job. My brother, who lived with me, was on the lookout for the cat, and I made posts on Facebook and registered him missing on the national database, but I had to go to Auckland.
Horatio never came back. There were no reported sightings of him.
Fast forward. We moved house again when our landlords got divorced and one of them moved back into the house. We moved again into the little bus house I built. A couple of years have gone by, it’s late 2021. We still had Juniper and Scoresby, but we lived in an entirely different part of the city, in a small bus.
I’m at work when I get a call from an unknown number. I know - I’m impressed that I answered it too. My days of being hounded by debt collectors are over so I am not as averse to answering the phone anymore.
“Hi, is this Charlotte?”
“Yes.”
“It’s [someone] from Kelburn Vets. Horatio has just been brought in. Don’t worry, he looks completely fine. We can keep him here until you’re ready to pick him up.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “What?! Horatio went missing TWO years ago.”
The person on the other end of the phone was as astonished as I was. She told me he looked very healthy and couldn’t believe he’d been gone for so long. I couldn’t believe my cat had come back from the supposed-dead after TWO YEARS. Someone had noticed him hanging around their flat for a few days, and had decided to catch him and take him to the vet. It was only a few streets over from where we lived.
We have no idea what happened to him for all that time, but due to our close proximity to university, my best guess is that he showed up at a student flat, no one quite knew who he belonged to, someone started feeding him, and he became a flat cat. Then they moved on, as students do, and because he didn’t belong to anyone, no one took him, so he turned up at the house of the person who took him to the vet. He was microchipped, so they were able to call me.
The trouble was, I lived in a small bus. The three pets had lived together before but I had no idea if they’d remember each other. The idea of fitting another pet into a tiny space was daunting, but he was my cat and of course I took responsibility for him. I was thinking through all this while at work, still in shock, when I went to the toilet with my phone in the back pocket of my jeans. Unaware and distracted as I was, I pulled my jeans down to sit on the loo and my phone slipped out of my pocket and into the toilet bowl. This was obviously less than ideal. I couldn’t dry it properly as I was at work, and had a returned cat to sort out. I dried it off as best I could, and hallelujah, it was still working fine.
I went home, picked up the cat crate, and tried to charge my phone for a bit. It didn’t want to charge. I went to pick up the cat and had posted about his miraculous return on Facebook. A couple of kind friends offered to help if I needed somewhere else for him to go. I thanked them and said I would keep it in mind but I’d give it a go taking him home.
It was chaos right off the bat. Horatio went to the front of the bus and sat in the window staring at us. As soon as Juniper saw him, she took up a position behind a pot plant and periodically hissed at him. Scoresby was desperate to make friends with this new creature, which meant he barked at him and kept crying and trying to jump up and sniff him. When you’re in a one room bus there are no options to separate the animals and get them used to each other slowly. After a couple of hours of trying to reassure Juniper and calm Scoresby down, I knew it wasn’t going to work.
I messaged my friend Jess, who had said she and her partner were thinking of adopting an adult cat anyway. “Can you take him tonight?” I asked. “I’ll drop him off.” I packed a litter tray and some cat biscuits, and headed to Upper Hutt. Bear in mind it was pitch black by this point, my son was overwhelmed, and my phone was almost dead, as it wouldn’t charge after being dropped in the toilet. I needed Google Maps to last long enough to get me to Jess’s house because I’d never been there before, and it was dark, and I had a tired child and a confused cat in the back of the car.
Thankfully we made it with 2% battery to spare. I told Jess and her partner everything I could remember about Horatio, and then left him with them, ready to surprise their five year old when he woke up the next morning. We drove home, and my phone died, and Juniper and Scoresby went back to behaving normally.
Jess sends me photos of Horatio occasionally, or I’ll tag her on Facebook when a memory of him pops up, so it’s nice that he’s gone to a friend and I know he’s ok this time. Maybe missing posters would have worked, if I’d put them up at the time, or maybe not. I’ve since heard other stories of cats going missing for three months, or six months, or other long periods of time, before coming back somehow. So if you’re missing a beloved cat, just know that sometimes, even when it seems like they must truly be gone, they may well be looked after, and they may return.
I love this so much. Not the sad parts, obviously, but the whole..