The Lower Frequencies

My awesome cat Finn has a bad habit of trying to dart out the door into the great wide world – not too sure what he expects he’ll find out there but it definitely won’t be ice cream.  Normally he’ll only make it out to the front yard and start sniffing around the zoysia, other times he’ll make it all the way to the wooded area of our lot and the next ten minutes will be spent trying to chase him back to the garage and cursing him. Some people, like Big Red Poet or my brothers, might suggest this is a sign that Finn is not happy in his current home, the former because he covets Finn and the latter because they’re mean, but I’m not going to dignify those kinds of thoughts with a reply/rebuttal, except for, “Screw you, Finn’s mine.”

This is the Finncat.

Anyway, today I was hanging out with the girls as none of us had school, thanks to the MLK holiday. Their grandfather came over to check on them and let them know their nanny Dorothy wanted to make pumpkin bread with them later in the day, then left for some errands.  My older daughter and I continued our game of Battleship (which she won), while my younger daughter begged to tag along with her Bubba, to no avail.

Thirty minutes later, I get up to see about getting lunch ready and that’s when I notice the door to the garage is open just enough to let a poofy cat scamper through.  Also, the garage door is up, so I immediately know Finn is GONE.  I spent the next ten minutes tracking around the woods snapping my fingers hoping Finn will be fooled into thinking it’s feeding time (that’s how I’ve conditioned my cats to know it’s time to eat, not that they really need a time…greedy bastards).  Nothing – I have no idea where he could be by this point.

I got back home and called Laura to tell her what had happened – she laughed and said served him right.  Actually, she didn’t say that, though that’s what I expected her to say because she hates Finn.  Really, though, she left work to come home and help look for him.

After hanging up with Laura, I went back out to look for Finny, but thinking it was a lost cause as he had never disappeared like this. Then I thought about the time Laura found the front leg of a cat next to the creek behind our house.  Then I thought about the night I saw a bobcat when I was out jogging. Then there were the reports of the packs of wolves roaming the streets (okay, I made that last one up). “Why couldn’t it have been Percy?” crossed my mind a few times as well – he’s newer and I wasn’t as attached to him yet.

Expendable.

As I’m walking out back in the woods again, I look up toward my back yard and, yep, there’s Finn, darting across the lawn back toward the front of the house .  Relief washes over me as I see my two girls attempt to corral him, but it immediately turns to dismay as they only succeed in chasing him under our neighbor’s fence. I shoo them back in the house (after taking the cat-food cannister from my older one) and call to Finn.  He peeks up from under the fence and mews at me a few times, probably thinking I’m going to scruff the shit out of him if he gets close enough.  His mouth is wide open as if he’s panting – this happens when cats get stressed out, I’m told (though I’m also told it might suggest a heart ailment, among other expensive problems).  I call to him a few times in my reassuring, “no, I’m not going to scruff the shit out of you” voice as he weighs his current freedom against his moral responsibility to me as my pet (hey, he is named Finn). Love wins out (I’ll tell myself it wasn’t a love of ice cream…)

Finn eventually trots over to me and lets me pick him up, and as I take him back in the house I hold him close, rubbing my nose and face in his thick brown fur, which is full of dirt and leaves from his adventure.  I don’t care.

Laura pulls up in the driveway and sees me with Finn, and promptly rolls her eyes.  She gets lunch and goes back to work. The girls fawn over Finn for a bit until Percy is noticed all alone, and Finn, seeing his opportunity, takes up residence on my bed.

I lay next to him for a bit.  He purrs as I scratch his ears.

Finn is back.

The Timeless Art of Lounging

This entry was posted on January 17, 2012 at 5:35 am and is filed under Pets with tags cat, Finn, ownership, runaway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.