Trooper

Shavon's black cat had been missing for a few days when she discovered a cat stuck high in a neighbor's tree. She had been hearing the cat crying for the past two days, but she could not find it until now. The cat was black, but it was about 50 feet high, and she could not see it well enough to determine if it was her missing cat or not. She contacted me for help, and I was there the next morning feeling very confident that it would be her missing cat. The cat was a bit cautious with me at first, but quickly turned friendly and trusting just as I expected from Shavon's description of her cat. This sweet cat stepped on my lap where I had prepared the cat bag, and I pulled the sides of the bag up around it and brought it down. I released the cat on the ground, and that is when Shavon got her first good look at the cat and knew immediately that this was NOT her cat. Instead, she was pretty sure that it belonged to a neighbor who works frequently and is often not home. It certainly was not behaving like a lost cat out of its territory. I gave the cat a can of food to eat, and it heartily ate it all and then headed to the neighbor's house where Shavon thought it belonged. It had spent at least three nights in the tree, some of which were pretty cold, and endured some periods of rain as well, but now that it was on the ground, it acted like that was all just a minor inconvenience that is now forgotten. For that reason, I am calling it Trooper, a fitting genderless name since I never learned if it is a male or female. The last time I heard from Shavon, she still had not found her missing cat.