Stories about our bestest buddy

The Pet Catcher

I have a tendency for being able to catch loose animals. I’ve wrangled 3 or 4 loose dogs (with varying degrees of story to STORY, all for another day), missed a couple of others, not to mention tracking down a loose Binky once upon a time.

But this time, it was our current neighbor’s cat, who had just got loose. Patricia heard the neighbors panickily looking around for a loose pet (they just got a dog) and we both sprang into action both as pet lovers and good neighbors.

Neo (if we heard right) wasn’t hard to catch. I walked out the back door and saw a flick of a tail just off the stairs, clicked my tongue and was greeted by a feline face coming around the corner and up the stairs to see me, very willing to be picked up.

But…

This is a cat Binky and I regularly saw in the window next door while Bink took his constitutional up the driveway. There was always a hint of ‘WHAT THE HELL HOW ARE YOU OUTSIDE WHAT ARE YOU DOING’ in the way Neo looked out the window[1] he (she?) was perched in.

When I saw the cat in the backyard… well, most of my brain was ‘Save the Cat, Save the World’.. no, ‘Save the Cat!’ It was an instinctual rescue. Get the cat close, pick it up, get it back to its family. And Neo came willingly, very happy to get close and get picked up, though there was a little struggle as we moved towards the gate.

But part of my brain felt a sense of loss. A wondering where that handsome white+more cat went, he regularly came out of this backyard, where is he? I told Patricia I half expected to open the back door and for the cat to sprint into the house. It’s anthropomorphizing, but I feel like he really was looking for Binky.

Was he? Probably not. I want others to feel this loss like I do—like we do. But maybe, just maybe, someone from across the way realized that someone was missing and slipped out their back door just to figure out where they went.

Edited to add: When I handed Neo back, I wanted to share how Binky and Neo would look at each other. How Binky had recently left us for his next adventure. How I was sorry that Neo might be wondering what happened. I don’t think I could have kept my composure if I had. And they were having a party of sorts, just guests visiting, and I didn’t want to harsh the mellow as it were. In the end, rescuing a lost pet was good enough… I think.

[1] Honestly, they might have two cats and, if they do, they’re both gingers which means maybe it wasn’t the same cat.

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