crowdog66

So... this afternoon I'm coming up the front steps to our apartment building with a load of groceries when, lying on the front steps, I see this cat:



The caretaker happens to be in the front lobby and lets me in.

"Is that your cat?" I ask.

"No," he replies, and proceeds to explain that the cat has been hanging around the building for the last couple of weeks, sneaking in when it can and running up to the top floor. The owners of the building are fed up and want it OUT.

I look at the cat. The cat looks back at me.

"Well, damn," I say, and ask the caretaker to let the cat into the front lobby while I run upstairs with my groceries, tell George that we have a stray cat incoming, and come back down to pick the little beast up.

"Little" isn't exactly accurate, though. This cat is as big as Micawber was. And as soon as I get him up into the studio he starts growling and hissing, evidently not liking the smell of Emmie and Mina very much. Out come the oven mitts for handling him -- I don't feel like having my arm laid open or a nice set of cat toothmarks imprinted in my hand.

Fortunately the sounds of anger turn out to be just sounds and not action. A search in his ear turns up a tattoo. A couple of phone calls to the Winnipeg Humane Society rule out several different interpretations of this tattoo (the damned things are far down in the ear and nearly impossible to read under the best of circumstances). The one that comes up a winner is for a long-haired brown tabby named Kelso, and it turns out that Kelso's owner has vanished off the face of the Earth -- not even her family knows where she is, and she's stopped talking to them. *sigh* It's abandonment, pure and simple, and since we can't keep Kelso ourselves I loaded him into a cat carrier and cabbed him over to the WHS. (Easier said than done, since after gobbling down some dry cat food Kelso crawled under one of the studio tables to sleep and had to be manhandled out; fortunately he crawled right into the cat carrier, avoiding the hassle of trying to figure out how to load a struggling cat through that small opening.)

Thirty-two dollars in cab fare later, Kelso was at the WHS and I was back home. Meanwhile, George had gone down to the caretakers with our rent cheque and discovered that someone else in the building was actually interested in taking Kelso in. *sigh again* We'll pass on his tracking info from the WHS, and hopefully they can adopt him from them sometime in the near future... the workers at the WHS said that because they have his full history they can probably put him up for adoption starting tomorrow.

Now, here's a request for all you good folks who are following my LiveJournal: no matter what your religion, or lack thereof, could you send some prayers/magic/good thoughts Kelso's way? He could use a hand in dodging the euthanasia bullet and getting adopted ASAP. I'll be firing up my standing altar and sending some prayers to Bast tonight myself.

Here's hoping Kelso gets some good luck.