Two summers ago we were introduced to a little piece of the abyss named Cricket. Seriously cool little guy, he would jump the fence from the next door neighbor's house and play with my cat Jack almost every day. Jack is a few years older and has very little interest in leaving his own kingdom/yard (nor the cat treats that he's contracted into the rental agreement).
Cricket, though, being so young wanted to explore and saw no barrier when looking at a fence. I would often hear branches moving around in the trees only to see him fly down the trunk head first. I've never seen a house cat that looked and acted more like a panther.
After a while we stopped seeing Cricket so much and it got more normal not to see him for days or weeks. At first his owner would get worried, but after a while they stopped caring because they couldn't hold him down. He'd cry at the door for hours if he wasn't let free.
In my opinion, they let him run free from too young an age, but there was nothing we could do except enjoy his company when he came around, which became less and less frequent until we just didn't see him anymore.
Then suddenly the neighbors got a call. Cricket had been spotted and captured... Ten miles to the south. This cat had wandered himself through wilderness, surviving all kinds of things, and it was just a normal thing for him. When he got back, he continued his exploring. We haven't seen Cricket since before last winter, and while we hope that he finally settled down in a home that offered really good food, we know what is most likely.
This actually brings me to last week when our 14 year old skittish bag of hair and bones somehow disappeared. She lives in the basement and doesn't often come out, just putting a sweatshirt on could send her sprinting away into hiding for days at a time. It's just how she grew up and at 14 years old, there is no changing it.
Even at her old age, the call of the wild is strong and she'd begun sneaking through the open door. Normally it was not difficult to get her back, like I said, she is skittish and never went far.
Til last week.
I saw her Thursday before work and that was the last time we remembered seeing her. She's not easy to find when she wants to hide, which is what she did often. After not seeing her for a day or two we went looking in the basement and noticed that she was missing. With each passing day we lost more hope.
Since she was so old, we thought it was possible that she had felt it was her time and that she found a bush to die in somewhere. It was unlikely, we thought, that she would have jumped the fence and explored. At 14 and being so skittish, it just didn't seem likely. After an early snow storm hit, we thought for sure that she was gone and we had begun making peace with that fact.
It's never easy to lose a cat, and with Scoot I felt really bad that she had chosen to be in the basement almost her whole life. If anything, I was glad she was out in the wild doing what wild cats do even if that's how her life ended.
And then today she just bounds back in through the open door, hungry as hell, but not really any different than last week... I would trade a lot just to be able to talk to cats for one day. Where did you go????
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/dgqkj9/where_do_they_go/
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