Ginga

(an old photo)

Some of you have asked about our cat Ginga’s adventure and return so here it is. When we moved in early February last year from a teeny tiny house to a house 3x as big the cats were terrified. They hid in the bed all day and cried all night. We tried locking them in the laundry and Ginga (the clever one) managed to open the door to the alcove where the washing machine was and his fat brother got stuck down the side of it. So we let them out after 3 days. It was night time in summer, we thought it was safe. That night there was a BIG thunderstorm. Crap. Rastus came back, Ginga did not. Our best guess is he went to our old house 15 mins drive away and when he saw we weren’t there he came back towards the new house but…lost his way? Two weeks later Rastus also ran away (he always was a bit slow) and after 20 days we found him at the old house hiding in bushes – skinnier and smarter and very happy to be found.

(an old photo but so freaking cute! He was not sure what those fish things were.)

He fast became the king of the castle now his smaller but smarter/tougher brother was gone. A big spoilt sooky baby. We followed up a few possible sightings of Ginga but let me tell you – ginger cats seem to be the type to run away. Two girls once caught a ginger cat and called us thinking maybe it was ours. Nope, they kidnapped a strangers cat.

Anyway after 8 months we moved here and Rastus stayed in for a month to be safe. His punishment since running away has been a fluoro yellow collar and a bell. Our punishment was a month of crying and trying to open windows. He nearly made it too. We always hoped Ginga would be found but didn’t really have much hope after a while. He never was a people lover and we worried he was probably feral after a while.

Fast foward to May 3rd this year. I got a call from a woman in Auckland (over 9 hours drive north) saying she’d seen our ad online and our cat looked like one in a new listing for a found cat! How nice was that? So I called the people, Dave and I went round and saw the cat and it was him. He had been stealing their cats food, even going into their house and crossing the whole house (we had that happen to us last year and it’s bloody annoying!) to get to it. He had even taken a shine to the man of the house and let himself be picked up.

He has a huge white hairless scar on top of his sweet little head but his pads (which were always cracked) are in almost perfect health now, he has no fleas compared to the many he always had and is roughly the same size as he was. It seems like maybe someone was taking care of him. I hope so, it broke our hearts last winter when it rained so much and was so cold. If he could tell us where he’d been…well I am dying to know!

We really hope that the kitties will be friends again soon and go back to this: