Last week I mentioned a new cat in the Drum family. There is more to the Drum family than just Marian and me, though, and the new cat is a brown tabby who decided to adopt my mother a few days ago. Mom named her Meowser because she meows a lot, which I suppose is fair turnabout since we kids named one of our first cats Meow because, you know, meow.
Anyway, I went over to get some pictures last Sunday, but Meowser was nowhere to be found. Then we heard—yes—a meow coming from somewhere, and after a bit of investigating it turned out that Meowser had somehow gotten into the crawl space beneath the house. Unfortunately, there have been painters and roofers and sundry other hired helpers around the house for several days, and this has spooked all the cats. One of them is hiding in the attic and Meowser, it turned out, had chosen the crawl space and didn’t really want to come out. So we had our work cut out for us. Let me set the scene for you. Here’s the big (i.e. human sized) entrance to the crawl space after I removed the grate. If you look closely you can see a pair of cat eyes peeking out:
After a while Meowser tentatively decided to make an appearance:
Unfortunately, after a few seconds she decided she was unsure about the whole thing and zipped back under the house, where she went back to watching us doubtfully. On the bright side, this is a great cat picture:
Finally my mother decided to lure her out with a plate of food. This got Meowser’s attention:
Sure, it might be risky, but a cat’s gotta eat:
And for the record, here’s a closeup so you can see what Meowser really looks like:
The good news about all this is that Meowser was hungry and thin when she wandered into my mother’s house. She is now hungry and well fed. The bad news is that when my mother tried to sneak behind her and replace the grate, Meowser detected the trickery and zipped back. So I never really did get to make friends with her.
In any case, Mom reports that Meowser is now out and all entrances to the crawl space have been blocked off. Unfortunately, Lily is still in the attic and won’t come down, which makes it a real pain to keep her in food and water. But naturally Mom does. When the workers are gone and everyone relaxes a bit, we all hope she’ll finally come down.
POSTSCRIPT: Once again, a shout out to all the camera nerds. These pictures were shot in pretty dim light at the end of the day. The camera settings were f/4, ISO 5000-10000, shutter speed 1/100. And yet the pictures came out perfectly nicely. Even after two decades of using them, I continue to marvel at the photos I can routinely get with a good digital camera.
POSTSCRIPT 2: After lunch today I’m headed over to Mom’s house on a mission of mercy to see if the two of us can somehow lure Lily down. Unfortunately, Lily is scared of me and also seems to be as happy as a clam in her new snoozing spot. We’ll see what we can do.
