Vivian's RV Vignettes

All right, the Find Peter Fan Club naturally has lots of questions, and I decided it’s better to start a new post than to have the answers lost in the comment thread. 

Peter and I are currently cuddling on the sofa at Margaret’s house. He’s pretty skinny after a month of foraging for himself and he put away a lot of kibble, but he seems very relaxed and at peace here, which is what I was hoping for. (He’s only been here once before, during the Big Freeze of ’21, and at that point he was totally freaked out… I guess he’s had a few life experience since then!). Margaret’s been giving him love and cuddles, too. We are the two human beings on earth that he’s comfortable with, since Margaret was still living with me when I adopted Peter as a 7-week-old feral kitten.

As to how I found him…

When Peter first got lost (October 12) and last time I passed through San Antonio (October 30), I put up a bunch of flyers with a picture of him in the surrounding businesses. Some of them, I’m sure, got taken down right away, but some of the ones I put up originally were still there when I came back through. I also talked to people who worked in those businesses, and just about everybody was super kind and friendly and helpful. I’d already had a couple of other people text me about cats they had found in the area, but when they sent pictures I could easily tell it wasn’t Peter.

I got another text last Saturday from someone who lives nearby. He said he had seen one of my flyers and that there had been a stray cat hanging around his house lately. He only had one very bad picture of it, from which I couldn’t tell anything one way or the other, but he promised to try to get a better one. By this time I was camped in Columbus, TX, a two-hour drive from where Peter got lost, so I wanted to be as sure as I could before making the drive.

I sent him additional pictures of Peter. On Sunday, he texted me that his wife had looked at my pictures and said definitively that the cat coming to their house was NOT Peter. However, that very day he had spotted a different cat hanging out behind his local Target, and he wondered if it might be Peter. He sent me a series of four fairly distant and grainy pictures, the best he could get because the cat was shy of him. The most I could say for sure was that I couldn’t swear the cat WASN’T Peter. As I said in my other post, solid-gray tabbies tend to look alike. Even in our old neighborhood, there was another cat that looked so much like Peter that I nicknamed him Doppelganger, and I told them apart more by behavior than by appearance.

My informant said he’d try again with tuna to see if he could get closer pictures, but I realized the only way I was going to know for sure was to go myself. It’s a long way to drive on a faint hope, but I knew I wouldn’t have peace unless I went to see. So today I went. The Target shows up on Google maps as being almost a mile from where he went missing, but that’s along roads. The backside of it is along the same dry creek bed that runs behind the gas station, just a little over 2,000 feet in a direct line. It was just outside the radius of the area I had searched.

I parked at Target and started walking the back alleyway behind it and the adjacent Dollar General, along the line of the creek. There was a dry retention pond back there, fenced off, with cat-sized gaps under the fence, heavily overgrown with brush, punctuated by sheltering culverts, and next to the dumpsters of several of the strip mall businesses. In other words, pretty much perfect for a small furry beast seeking shelter, cover, and a happy hunting ground for small rodents. I had a feeling, so I started walking along the fence line calling Peter’s name.

The brush was so thick that I never would have seen him in a million years if he hadn’t responded. I heard him meowing back to me long before I could see him, but I knew it was him because that’s how he has always answered when I call and no other cat would have answered to his name like that. Finally I spotted him on the lip of one of the culverts, and slowly he made his way up to a gap under the fence, meowing all the way. It took him a minute to decide to come out, and he still wouldn’t quite come to me, staying just an arm’s length away. It was clear that he was happy to see me, but also he was smart enough to know that I would have to stick him in a car and take him somewhere, which is what he had run away from in the first place.

He followed me across a field back to the front of the store, where I had parked my truck. I got out the crate and the tuna I had brought. He was pretty excited about the tuna, and with that to distract him, I succeeded in grabbing him and stuffing him by force into the crate, very much against his protests. (That felt icky, but I didn’t have a lot of choice.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that one of the crate clips was loose. Just when I thought all was safe, my little escape artist threw his weight against the insecure door and burst out of it, to my enormous incredulity and dismay. Thankfully he didn’t run far. There followed a long, patient battle of wills and patience and hunger and tuna, which finally ended with me catching him again and getting him into the (now secure) crate.

The drive to Margaret’s house was long, but he mostly handled it pretty well. I think he even slept part of the time.

Of course the big question I’ll have to figure out now is what the future will look like. He definitely is NOT willing to be a road warrior cat, and I won’t ever ask that of him again. It might be that he can stay with me in the RV sometimes when I’m not going anywhere (he seemed pretty comfortable with that before I tried to take him on the road). It might be that he just needs to stay here with Margaret for a while, if she’s willing, to have the stability of a house that’s not on wheels. We’ll see. But at least for tonight, we’re just happy to snuggle up with each other.