Last Minute Thankfulness

Though I have much for which to be grateful in my life, I was hoping the Thanksgiving weekend, and the day itself, would not pass by without giving me one extra thing for which to be thankful. Nor did it. At about ten minutes after eight o’clock last night, I successfully trapped Sable.

She is currently in my bathroom, still in the trap; I might not be able to put her into anything portable if she were let out. This morning, she will go to another member of the rescue-group, where she will reside in a large cage, with a carrier inside it as her safe-zone. She will stay there for a couple of weeks until I move. Then she will come to live with me. There is a chance that she will be adoptable, but she has been feral all her life, so just getting her used to living inside with a human will be a chore.

For those who may not be familiar with Sable, I will explain her history. She and her sister, whom I named Sablette, were part of a feral colony in my neighbourhood. Before I arrived at the Cosy Apartment, they had been trapped and spayed, along with the others in the colony. The colony was then dispersed when the near by business was sold and its environment re-arranged. About two and a half years after I moved into the apartment, Sable and Sablette, two black cats whom I was told by older residents were sisters, started showing up outside my concrete ditch. I began feeding them, along with other cats.

The siblings were not regular visitors at first, and they would disappear for extended periods. Later, I would joke that they were visiting their holiday property by the lake. Then they stopped coming for an even longer while, and when I noticed a return, in March of 2020, it was only Sable. I never saw Sablette again.

Sable had been the bolder one of the pair, though now she was more skittish. She nonetheless came to know that food was to be had at Café Cosy, as much food as she could want. She came to know my voice, and would respond to the name I had given her. She remained at least semi-feral - though, to be honest, I don’t know if she may have once had a home, when very young - and never let me come close. But she came to trust me to an extent: if I startled her, not knowing she was present when I walked into or by the ditch, she would run, but stop and wait if I called to her.

I always had a fantasy of capturing her and keeping her inside and secure, but there were always other cats who needed the library as their safe-zone, always other cats to rescue. But once I decided to move, I knew I had to make capturing Sabe a priority. I knew too that it would not be easy. With her intelligence and experience, she would be prove a most exacting opponent.

Yesterday, I posted how difficult she was being. But I also came across a trick on-line that I thought might help. Sable had a habit of going into a trap and picking up food with her claw; to do this, she would stretch as far as she could and reach as far as she could, avoiding stepping on the trip-plate that closed the open trap. If I left a tempting trail toward the main bait, she would be satisfied with taking the trail. I saw something on-line that looked promising.

I inserted a stick width-wise through the mesh of the trap, at a point that was very near the trip-plate, but far enough from it that Sable could not reach the food from the safe-side of it. There would be only the main prize of food, in a dish not on the floor of the trap but suspended on strings, so that it would be clearly visible and, hopefully, tempting (Originally, I thought dishes would be too heavy, and planned to use tin foil. The day was very windy, however, and the foil was not heavy enough to keep from being blown about. The lightest dishes I had served well.) The purpose of the stick was to make her step over it, right onto the trip-plate. Even if she wanted to avoid it - her instincts are very good - she had to put pressure on it to reach the food.

I don’t know if it worked, as I was not watching at the time, and the back third of the trap was covered with a blanket. But the stick was the only difference between this success and previous failures. I came out from the bedroom at one point and saw Sabe in the trap but facing the entrance, which I thought unusual. Then I observed that the door was shut. She was trapped.

Sable was quiet during the night, though periodically I heard a medium-pitched hoot from the bathroom. She did not claw or bite at the steel mesh; she has been calm, and even sniffed my finger. She is not - yet - acting like a feral.

The great anxiety now will be to have her eat. Many times, cats in new environments will refuse food for a dangerous amount of time. A feral used to the great outdoors, confined now in a relatively small space, is in the newest environment imaginable. Some good thoughts directed toward Sabe’s appetite would be appreciated.

I still want to catch Cicero and Arliss, but may not be able to in the time remaining. Both present unique challenges. Sable I wanted to catch most of all. She was known to residents before I arrived at the Cosy Apartment, which makes her at least nine years old, and since she and Sablette had been spayed probably a year priorly, she is likely in her early teens. For her to age and, inevitably, sicken, out in the wild, with no one providing meals or medicine was a most unpleasant thought for me. I hope she will adjust and live out her last years in comfort and safety, and maybe even happiness.