Picture it: Central Alberta, 2021. It's a dark and stormy night. I've just put the children to bed, tucking them in with hugs and kisses. I hear something. It sounds like a cat meowing. I think to myself that maybe the kids left one of their iPads on with a game playing. I go to check, but the sound seems to be coming from outside. Thunder rumbles. The meowing gets louder.
I step outside on to the deck, my housecoat flails in the high winds, and there, looking up at me with innocent yellow eyes is an orange tabby.
End scene.
The above is a detailed account of the actual events that transpired two nights ago. The TL:DR version is simply that an orange tabby cat showed up at my house two nights ago during a storm.
The cat meowed and meowed and even found my bedroom window to meow at when I went to bed. Finally, I got up and gave it some of the leftover shepherd's pie from supper and it left me alone.
In the morning, I assumed that it was gone and that I probably wouldn't see it again.
Wrong.
It came back around mid-morning and meowed again until I gave it a hot dog. Then it stuck around until bed time, at one point even making its way into the house when the kids didn't close the door properly.
The cat is a very friendly male cat that has clearly been malnourished, but is also neutered. I checked for any ear tattoo and found none, then I checked the local lost-and-found sites to see if anyone had reported this handsome fellow as missing. But I did find out that many people in the local community have a habit of adopting kittens and then, when they become adult cats, bringing them out to the country and dropping them off.
I'm going to be printing out a couple of flyers to hang in some of the local towns and taking the cat in to the vet to see if it has a microchip. We'll see. In the meantime, he has a very safe and cozy spot to live on our back deck where he can come and go as he pleases, and I'll be picking up some cat food so I don't have to feed him all of my hot dogs.
My kids are adamant that he is ours, now, and have taken to calling him Rocky. In a way, I'm really quite hoping that my search for his owners is unfruitful. The morning of the day he showed up, my daughter was asking Siri "Siri, how do I get a cat?" Apparently, good things come to those who wait?