A furry friend’s furlough – An Irishman’s Diary about the search for Pete Briquette

Our cat Pete Briquette went missing three weeks ago, so far without trace. His disappearance happened, as I since realised, four years to the day since I first found him, as a wet, week-old kitten on a bog road in Tipperary.

But unless he was some kind of replicant, like the humanoids of Blade Runner (they also had a four-year lifespan, with a self-destruct mechanism if Harrison Ford didn't get them first), that was just a coincidence.

Call of the wild

For an added omen, the date in question was August 12th, the traditional “Scattering Day” at Puck Fair. So maybe Pete too felt some ancient call of the wild. In any case, he scattered, to a place or fate as yet unknown.

I scoured our neighbourhood in the days afterwards, lest he be squashed on a road somewhere. He wasn’t. Then I toured his favoured hunting grounds, including our stately neighbour, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, whose precincts are separated from us by a 12ft wall.

Situation

I had to rescue him from there once when the place was in lockdown for a meeting of EU finance ministers. This involved explaining the situation to a Garda at the gate and then being accompanied to the scene from which we could hear Pete’s plaintive miaowing.

Naturally, being a cat, he stopped miaowing when we found him and instead behaved as if he had never seen us before, while the security cordon looked on suspiciously. But that was then. This time, he wasn’t to be found there either.

Among the worst-case scenarios we constructed was one in which, with typical promiscuity, he had crept through an unknown neighbour’s bedroom window and then fallen asleep, just before the neighbour shut the window and went on holidays, or emigrated. That too was gradually eliminated from our inquiries.

Pigeon

A few days into the cat-hunt, meanwhile, a stricken pigeon turned up on in our road. It was just old or sick, or both. But it could no longer fly wherever birds go to die, and it was roasting in the August sun. So I took it in and put in our back yard, where it immediately found a sheltered roost, on the crossbeam under a table.

This was tempting fate, since if the prodigal feline returned in the night, he would surely help himself to the fatted bird (we had left the pigeon supper, in case he was hungry). Sure enough, in the morning, our avian guest was dead. But it was apparently of natural causes; there was still no cat.

If Pete has come to a bad end somewhere, well, my consolation is that it happened four years later than it might have done. On our first meeting, I almost mistook him for a scrag-end of turf, fallen off the back of a trailer. Only that the scrag-end developed ears at the last moment, I might have crossed him with my front car-wheel.

Pet

Reprieved, he lived to become an urbanised pet – much-loved if often exasperating, especially at four o clock in the morning, when he liked to serenade us from bedroom window sills, demanding to be let in; or to dance on piano keys downstairs, demanding to be let out.

He also had a bad habit of attacking our other cat – an extremely antique animal that, despite Pete’s daily assaults, lived to be about 100 in feline years before making a final, one-way journey to the vet’s earlier this summer.

I wonder now if that last event had anything to do with Pete’s subsequent disappearance. Maybe he missed not having the old cat around to torture and has gone searching for him.

But assuming he hasn’t been killed, or programmed out, I like to think he is just on an extended ramble somewhere, getting in touch with his feral side.

Predator

He was never quite tamed during four years with us. Although he got used to being picked up and petted, he always hated it.

And he remained a relentless predator to the end – of mice, rats, birds, or occasionally wild dogs (when watching, as he sometimes did, the David Attenborough programme).

So he should be resourceful enough to survive living rough. But who knows? Maybe he has found another host family somewhere – one with better food or furniture. In which case, fair enough.

Cats are cats – there’s no point being anthropomorphic about them. So if Pete is safe and enjoying a new life somewhere, I can only wish the ungrateful little bastard well.