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Wow! It’s Wednesday! The Curious Case of Steve

steveSo one of the many stressful things that happened during last Tuesday’s move was that our cat, Steve ran away.

Background: Steve basically tricked us. When we first encountered him as a kitten at the shelter, he was very lovey-dovey. But after we got him home, he basically took a cue from our other cat, Cornelious, who has never gotten over being slightly feral and only occasionally shows us any affection. Except Steve took it a step further and has managed to act like he is super-scared of us, even though he’s been with us for almost a year and we feed him and clean up his poop. We love him anyway. It’s a choice.

In order to keep him from getting out of the house while all the doors were open for the movers, we put him and his brother in cardboard carriers in our old master bathroom. This is harder than it sounds, b/c it’s rather difficult to wrangle a cat that doesn’t want you to touch him and put him in a box. Then he got out of the box three times and CH kept on having to rewrangle him and retape the box in a way that clever Steve wouldn’t be able to figure his way out of it.

Alas, while I was waiting at the old house and CH was at the new house, telling the movers where to put the first load of boxes, Steve managed to escape again and then when he encountered the movers, he ran downstairs. I waddled after him and even managed to get him into one room and into my arms, but then he scratched my face and arms, drawing blood, in his efforts to be let go. I dropped him and he was off again.

Long story short, we couldn’t find him after that, even after looking for him everywhere.

Fast forward to that night, Cornelius kept us up all night wailing like an abandoned woman from a Greek tragedy. It was terrible, and CH went back to the house to look for Steve the next day. But no luck.

We just had to hope that since Steve won’t let any human being near him that he would turn up with Animal Control and that they would call us, since Steve has an RFID tag. So we waited and Cornelius wailed every night.

Then on Thursday, CH heard a cat mewing in the night, but when he opened his eyes, Cornelius was by the bed staring up at him. So CH followed the mewing to the closed basement door and when he went downstairs, Steve ran out and past him up the stairs. From what we could piece together, Steve must have decided to hide from the evil humans in one of the office moving boxes, which then got moved to the new house. And since we keep the basement door closed, though he got out of the box, he wasn’t able to get out of the basement until two days later.

We’re still a little bemused about this lost and found story. Do you guys have any curious cases of pet disappearances and reappearances? Let us know in the comments.