The Chaotic Night

Can’t have one quiet minute with us can we?

We keep our two house cats 100% inside always but as expected 200 square feet is not exactly conducive to house cat comfort. Obviously, they want outside. So we decided we would start letting them outside in short periods of time to get used to the new world they have available to them. The very first night I was convinced that Oliver had straight up been eaten by a coyote. He didn’t come home. He was gone for two days. Anakin, the angel he is, came back every few ours for check ins. As he should. So on the third day I can worried. I called and called and shook food bowls and snack bags and went walking and could not find this cat. It started to get dark and Jaken wasn’t yet home from work so I started cooking dinner and praying the cats would come home.

I decide to check outside again. I hear a mewing so I peer out into the darkness and see what looks like an Oliver colored cat out by the tree. I get my light, pick up Hope, and we walk out to the sound cautiously. Not Oliver. Not Anakin. Not Pinkie or Greenie….a random male cat just sitting out in the yard yelling at me. Nope not having that. We turn around and walk back to the house and to my surprise there is Oliver sitting at the front door. Well that’s convenient timing isn’t it? I get to the door and let him in. I hear a rustling under the house. What now?

Durotan comes running up with a rotting chicken corpse in his mouth. Not one of our chickens. Not a freshly killed chicken either and they are both covered in pond scum and lilly pad seeds. Great now I need to deal with that.

I hear a mewing. I turn and look under the wagon. Bandit the other stray cat who has been hanging around realizes I haven’t put any food out for him to steal and he sees the OTHER stray cat that has now wandered up to the empty food bowls. Good heavens. I try to shoo the random cats away, get Oliver in the house, here comes Anakin ready to come in, get Durotan to drop the dead chicken, and almost step on a dead snake I guess one of the many cats have left as a gift. Okay clearly this is not my night.

I get Durotan and the cats who do live here in the house and continue cooking dinner. Jaken calls to check in and I describe the absolute chaos that has ensued thus far. He asks where the dead chicken is now to which I say “still outside I guess, I haven’t been able to move it”. He recommends trying to get it into a trash bag so it “doesn’t attract any more critters”. I step outside to evaluate the chickens status and stop dead in my tracks. A gorgeous, very large, and very alive cotton mouth snake has taken up residence on the porch.

Now none of the stray cats want anything to do with this guy obviously and I am in the middle of a phone call and carrying a toddler around. I tell Jaken “well looks like someone has already been attracted to it, there’s a snake, I gotta go”, hang up on him, go strap the toddler into her high chair with her dinner, find a shovel, sneak around behind the snake, and wildly attempt to disconnect its head from its body. I managed to succeed on the first try thankfully. I get a trash bag and daintily shove the dead chicken and now two dead snakes into the bag and toss them into the dumpster.

This has to be a bad omen right? Too many weird occurrences within minutes of each other. I spent the rest of the night on edge waiting for something else to happen. Thankfully nothing further crazy transpired, the stray cats left, and the house cats returned to their cozy beds cuddling us to sleep. All is right with the world again for another moment.