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February 10, 2010
A Stranger At The Cat Door
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Timmy started growling like crazy at the cat door the other night. I have two cat doors...one from the family room into the garage, and another from the garage to outside the house. This way I don't have a bunch of freezing cold air coming in through the cat door.
To the best of my knowledge, I've never had anything come inside the house through the pet door that wasn't one of our pets. Timmy uses it all the time, as he goes outside to use the bathroom, which pleases me immensely. Slinky uses it when she's here as well.
But other than that, I've never had anything come through it, to my knowledge, aside from Slinky and Timmy.
Like, for instance, if a skunk came inside, well that would be disastrous, wouldn't it? But so far, nothing like this has happened.
But lately, I've been having my suspicions. When I go out into the garage at night, sometimes I hear the outside cat door swinging as I open the garage door. I tried to convince myself that it was the pressure change caused by me opening the garage door which caused the cat door to swing, but I was never able to replicate this effect.
So, I've harbored this sneaking suspicion for some time that something unknown was sneaking into the garage at night, presumably to keep warm.
And then, the other night, Timmy started growling ferociously. Now, granted, Timmy's a cat - not a mountain lion, but he got my attention. He was in the family room, staring at the cat door to that leads into the garage and making a howling noise that made my hair stand up on the back of my neck.
So, I threw open the garage door and heard the familiar swinging of the 2nd cat door to the outside and I raced over there and looked out into the snow and this time...I saw tracks.
Now, I'm not good at tracking animals. I couldn't track a bleeding elk through the snow in broad daylight. But I did see some tracks. I wasn't sure if they were cat, dog, fox, or mountain lion. But they weren't coon tracks. Not deer/elk tracks. Not bird tracks. My guess was a fox-type of animal.
So, now, I'm thinking....great...basically, there's some animal coming into my garage, trying to get up enough nerve to come into the house and eat Timmy. A fox, no doubt. And he's watching Timmy through the cat door and licking his chops thinking how delicious Timmy looks.
So I came back inside and got some flashlights and scurried back outside into the frozen darkness and marched down the hill. I wanted to know what, exactly, was hiding in my garage at night and scaring Timmy half to death.
And then, I saw it....running away through the snow. A neighbor's black cat. I called Jennifer to tell her what I'd seen.
"Jen...do the neighbors have a black cat?"
"Yes sir. Don't you remember? Rosemary thought he was Timmy and she stuck him in through Timmy's cat door and into our garage that one time?"
"Seems like I do remember that, now that you mention it."
"Remember??? We named him Timposter," because he was an imposter that looked like Timmy.
Posted by Rob Kiser on February 10, 2010 at 8:05 PM
Comments
Timposter today, red fox tomorrow...umm???
Posted by: sl on February 10, 2010 at 9:12 PM
I hope not, but you never know. A fox would be better than a skunk, I think.
Posted by: Rob Kiser on February 10, 2010 at 9:50 PM