Winston
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 9:38 pm
So, I come back from a long day at work at 6.30pm to be greeted by Whisper.....but no Winston. As its been so cold and we'd had a lot of trouble bonding with these two we hadn't let them out yet. After a lot of fruitless searching of the house, my partner finally realised that the upstairs window might have been left open wide enough for him to go on an adventure.
So I venture out into the darkness of the back garden, thankfully high fenced in on most sides. Winston has bonded with me, but skittish with my partner, so I'm on my own or Winston would just flee. So my partner provides powerful illumination from a torch from the upstairs window, while I use a smaller one digging around in the bushes. I mew and call his name....and get a response! Hallelujah! Get ready for TWO HOURS of this. Winston is a completely black cat. We have very thick bushes. I have no idea if he is physically injured and can't move, traumatised and can't move, or scared and moving all the time.
I mew and move. Then mew and move. I keep trying to pinpoint Winston's position from his responses. In the end I deduce he MUST have ended up in my neighbour's garden, which is what happened with old Backy when we first moved here. So I asked my neighbour to check - no sign. So I went back to the bushes again, tried to pinpoint him again. This time I found my secateurs, and at 8pm I started cutting back my shrubbery! This time I got to the fence. The mewing MUST be coming from the neighbours side. All I could do was clear a space on the edge of the fence for Winston to jump up onto. I illuminated it with my little torch. I mewed. I gently scratched and patted the top of the fence. I kept doing this. Winston sounded like he was responding. And then......
......THE SWINE STARTED TO RUB AGAINST MY ANKLES! How long had he been sitting there watching me pat and scratch a fence!?!?
I still have no idea where he'd been hiding.
So I venture out into the darkness of the back garden, thankfully high fenced in on most sides. Winston has bonded with me, but skittish with my partner, so I'm on my own or Winston would just flee. So my partner provides powerful illumination from a torch from the upstairs window, while I use a smaller one digging around in the bushes. I mew and call his name....and get a response! Hallelujah! Get ready for TWO HOURS of this. Winston is a completely black cat. We have very thick bushes. I have no idea if he is physically injured and can't move, traumatised and can't move, or scared and moving all the time.
I mew and move. Then mew and move. I keep trying to pinpoint Winston's position from his responses. In the end I deduce he MUST have ended up in my neighbour's garden, which is what happened with old Backy when we first moved here. So I asked my neighbour to check - no sign. So I went back to the bushes again, tried to pinpoint him again. This time I found my secateurs, and at 8pm I started cutting back my shrubbery! This time I got to the fence. The mewing MUST be coming from the neighbours side. All I could do was clear a space on the edge of the fence for Winston to jump up onto. I illuminated it with my little torch. I mewed. I gently scratched and patted the top of the fence. I kept doing this. Winston sounded like he was responding. And then......
......THE SWINE STARTED TO RUB AGAINST MY ANKLES! How long had he been sitting there watching me pat and scratch a fence!?!?
I still have no idea where he'd been hiding.