Missing Max

When we left on our trip to Boston, Leif was gracious enough to take Max to his place for the long weekend. Max has stayed with Leif before, and when I dropped him off on Wednesday morning it was clear to me that he was fairly comfortable there. He went upstairs to the second floor loft almost immediately, scoping out his favorite perch.

Leif lives on a hillside in Mosier, OR surrounded by open fields and orchards, and during previous trips Max has done some exploring of the surroundings. On Friday morning we received a status report from Leif:

The temperature has been nice enough lately that I have had the doors open.

Though the doors were open, Max wasn't ready to go exploring. He'd stand next to the openings for a while yesterday. Eventually he made it to the top of the steps. Then later yesterday he took off for a little adventure. I think he went down to the creek area.

He went out today again too. I think he's having fun.

When indoors....it seems he's been wanting a lot of attention lately....so I've been giving it to him.

Sounds good to us. It's always nice to be able to spend your vacation worry free. We continued on our trip until Monday morning, when I received the following email from Leif:

call me... this is concerning Max.

This didn't sound good. I knew it wasn't good when I noticed that Leif had sent the email only to me - not to Corinne. I called Leif as soon as I read the message. Apparently Max went out exploring on Friday morning as he had indicated, but hadn't been seen since then. It was now Monday morning, so Max had been missing for 3 days. Leif went out looking for him for several hours over the weekend but to no avail.

When Max left he was wearing his collar - which has our home phone number on it - so I called to check our messages. No messages. There wasn't much more that we could do, so Leif suggested that he could make a poster and put it up at the post office and in the neighbors' mailboxes, just in case someone had seen him. Mosier doesn't have mail delivery, so everyone in town would theoretically see the poster when they came to pick up their mail. I pointed Leif to a photo from the blog, hung up, and tried to keep my composure.

I relayed the news to Corinne, and we were both pretty shaken. Since we've had him, Max had never been outside overnight, let alone 3 nights. We were sure that he was gone for good, most likely the victim of a vehicle or a coyote. We held little hope of seeing him again. When we decided to start letting Max outside, we of course knew that this was a possible result. Corinne had made her peace with this fact better than I had, but neither of us was in a very happy mood that Monday.

This was not how we had wanted to spend the last day of our vacation. We managed to drag ourselves through the last day in Boston - poor Becky had the job of entertaining us! At 4pm we boarded our plane to return home. It was a long flight. By this point I had even started to mentally compose this blog post as a memorial.

When we arrived in PDX I turned our cellphone back on and checked the messages. Leif had called to tell us that Max had been found and was fine!

Apparently a nearby neighbor, Jennifer, saw the "Missing" poster in her mailbox and took it home. About a half hour after she got home, Max appeared on her deck! He seemed a bit needy but otherwise healthy. She even had a dog at her house, but Max must have been so deprived (food, water, attention) by this point that he was willing to put up with more than usual.

Our dispositions changed immediately when we heard the news. The drive home was much more pleasant knowing that Max would be waiting for us. Part of me was still a little uneasy, though. Since Leif hadn't yet picked Max up when he left us the message, it was still possible that it was the wrong cat or that there was some other problem not immediately apparent. But since we arrived home late Monday night, it wouldn't be until Tuesday after work that we would have an opportunity to head see him firsthand.

Thankfully, Max truly was fine, albeit a bit tired and hungry. He slept at Leif's most of the day on Tuesday and showed no interest in going outside.

We felt bad for Leif, too. None of it was his fault, and yet he spent the weekend stressed out about losing Max. He spent a good portion of the weekend searching for him, and even called for advice from other family members on whether stress could have a negative effect on his pregnant sister (hence the email only to me.)

We'll never know what happened to Max during those 3 days. Was he chased by some animal? Did he end up in a tree or simply get lost?

What we do know is that while Leif was wandering the hillside looking for Max, he was also walking through plenty of poison oak. Oops. And apparently no one had told him that you should apply Tecnu BEFORE you show any symptoms. Double-Oops.

- Mike (& Corinne)