Random cat
For the last week or so, there has been a wailing, hungry young tom prowling round our neighbourhood. The Mogret is a bit bemused by this and hasn’t reacted with her normal anti-Other-Cat fury. I’d almost call her behaviour coquettish, if I didn’t know that she can read English and would skewer me for such cheek. It’s cute.
Random Cat was abducted by us last week, and trapped in the kitchen for several hours, whereupon he turned from a terrified, haunted-looking cat, into the most affectionate and friendly young cat I’ve ever met. He actually wailed when I stopped stroking him. Bless. But, as the evening wore on, I began to feel that maybe he wasn’t a stray: he was just too affectionate to be a truly random cat. So, I let him go.
I’ve been pining for him ever since, and subsequent attempts to entrap him again, have met with naught but bloodshed. Poor philb has some lacerations on his arm that will take a fair while to heal. But, my sympathy lies with Random Cat. He’s just too hungry to be being fed and adored on a regular basis. He’s so terrified of humans that you can actually see the internal battle between the hunger and the fear, and the hunger is powerful enough to let him come within a foot of a human, just to eat. That saddens me. All cats should have a human slave.
It’s so bitterly cold out there, that I worry about the poor mite. He doesn’t have the lush fur of the Mog and I bet he’s cold out there.
Hopefully, we will manage to bring him in and reassure him. In the meantime, he will continue to be fed by us. It would be so nice for Mog to have a friend to chase around. Us human creatures do try, but we can’t climb furniture and hide behind things in the same way that a cat can, so we let her down in the cat-entertainment department.