yonmei

yonmei @ 11:11 pm: Bob and the Great Outdoors
bubosquared and calapine and Ajay winolj were round last night, for an evening of skiffy and slash and wine and curry, and as bubosquared smokes, she was nipping out every so often to stand on the top step and smoke. Which Bob observed with great curiosity, sometimes following bubosquared to the door.

Bob is eight years old, and spent five years living in her former owner's garden shed and then in a cardboard box in merlins_lair's front garden. I'm used to indoor/outdoor cats, but as merlins_lair pointed out to me, once let in, Bob had showed no inclination to leave the house - she had happily spent several weeks shut up in their bathroom. (To keep them isolated from the other cats: merlins_lair has eight.) After all, she'd spent five years shut out from house she'd once regarded as home.

Sometimes, in the month or so since I got her, Bob has gone to the front door when I was hanging out clothes, and stood briefly on the top step, sniffing around a bit: but she'd never gone any further, and had usually hastily run back inside before I could shut the door.

Tonight I got back late, and was outside on the top step for a little while taking in clothes from the line. When I came back into the hall from hanging the still-damp clothes on the pulley in the kitchen, Bob was standing by the front door yelling at me to be let out. Well, um, I don't usually refuse a cat who wants to be let out, and this was really astonishing from Bob, so I let her out.

It only occurred to me as I saw her fluffy little bum vanishing down the steps that I hadn't got her an address tag for her collar - after all, I hadn't planned on trying to get her to go out till it was summer and I could sit on the steps with a book and a mug of tea.

Besides, I didn't want to close the front door on her. So I stood on the top step and watched. There is my neighbour's front garden and mine, either side of the steps, and our parking-area. Bob ran out to the edge of the parking-area, and nosed around the fences a bit, and checked out my neighbour's front garden, and a little bit of mine - she kept turning to look back at the front door, I could see her eyes reflecting the light from it - and then sat at the foot of the steps for a while, and then did it all over again. And then ran up the steps and came in. I picked her up and hugged her and told her she was a very brave cat, and she gave me the usual what-is-this-idiot-human-talking-about look that cats have patented.

About ten minutes later, she was demanding to go out again. But by that time, I'd made up my mind she wasn't going out again till (a) I'd got her an address tag and a new collar (she's still wearing Gallus's old and fragile one), and (b) she'd had her final jags to refresh her immunisations for cat flu and so forth.

Really what this says to me is that after five weeks with me, she's very nearly absolutely confident that she can go out, and I'll let her back in again.

The cat politics part of the story? Gallus and Bob are no nearer curling up together and grooming each other, but they hiss at each other only half-heartedly, and they are routinely just ignoring each other when they want to harass me for food and/or affection. Last night Bob came downstairs to be petted and loved and told she was beautiful, while Gallus sulked upstairs on my study chair, but Gallus has always been less of a friends-with-strangers-cat: I think it said less of jealousy-of-Bob and more of who-are-these-people.