I mentioned last October that the kittens had learned how to open the sliding screen doors to our deck and to our patio.
Presumably, they learned this by practicing on the pocket doors in the master bathroom which they learned how to open early on.
So I got some locks that fold up to lock the screen doors and down to open the door, and we’ve (well, I’ve) been very careful to engage the lock when opening the sliding doors to let air flow in.
As the sliding door in the master bedroom is the only window, we’ve (well, I’ve) been in the habit of leaving the door open overnight for nice cool sleeping weather.
This morning at roughly 3:00, I heard a commotion at the back door. My beautiful wife had mentioned that an outdoor cat had peeked in the other night. We’d been remarkably free of visits from neighborhood cats over the winter–I’d said as much to her recently (hence, literally remarkable), undoubtedly drawing the wrath of the gods in the process. So at 3:00, when I heard that ruckus at the door, I got up and checked. There was, indeed, a cat outside the screen. A young black cat. Probably another spawn of Peirce, the long black cat who spent a few weeks lounging in our back yard when we had Athena in the back yard. One of our cats–Muad’Dib or Nico–was inside looking at him relatively quietly. I closed the sliding glass door so that nobody would try to get at him through the screen. I didn’t go out to meet the new cat–Cisco, Nico’s brother, is an absolute berserker when he sees cats outside and is prone to attack the indoor cats or the people in the house when his tail is fat. So I didn’t want to draw his attention to the interloper. And it was 3am, and I wanted to go back to bed.
In the mornings, I generally find Muad’Dib in the living room, and he will trill for a scratch before I’ve had coffee. But not today. I couldn’t find him, and in a dedicated search, I determined he’d pushed the bottom of the screen out of its splined track and crawled out:
He had several hours of head start, and he’s probably under cover as it’s been raining all morning, so I could not find him when I walked the edge of the wind break and by the woodpile and shed looking for him. I presume he will return later today, hopefully with no wounds or insects upon him.
But now I’m beside myself thinking I should have gone out the back door this morning to corral him while he was still on the deck.
And now that he knows how to push that spline out, I’ll have to wonder how I can account for that–a second screen on the inside of the doors? And will the kittens (now three years old, but still kittens to me) apply this knowledge to the screens in the windows as well? Or only the ones with ledges, such as in the office here?
Too much excitement for me.
UPDATE: A little before three this afternoon, Paul of the House Atreides came back to the door on the deck and meowed to be let in, no doubt disappointed that he could not simply let himself in with the gap under the screen door.
