Found some pictures of Shorty the other day and decided he needs his story told. Here he is hard at work.
Last winter Mrs. Evans and I noticed a white cat sitting outside our back sliding door to the bedroom. He was no more than 2 feet away from Pumper the dog who was sleeping inside the door. Shorty just sat there watching everything then left after 20 minutes. Later in the week he came back, only this time he was in our garage looking into the house through the dog door. I kicked him out and put the door blocker in place so he couldn't get into the garage anymore. Every morning I would go out to the garage and he would be curled up against the door waiting to be let in. We are not cat people and it was clear he wanted to adopt us. So finally, I took him to work and let him become a yard cat at the shop. We kept a bowl of food and water for him and on the first day he killed a mouse and left it out for us to see that he was keeping busy around the shop at night.
A few days after winning our hearts and minds the little feller just disappeared, gone, not even a good-bye note or anything. For 2 mornings we would race to his food bowl to see if he had eaten anything through the night but no, it was as full as when we left it the day before.
Now we've had a few shop cats over the years but they always vanish after a few weeks or months. Sometimes it's the owls or eagles. Sometimes they just walk away to be seen in a whole different area of the golf course. Sometimes they make it to the road and meet up with a car travelling 50 mph which I know for a fact hurts like hell. But this dude was gone and all of us tough guys were heart-broken. We thought he was going to be different. He really seemed to love his new job.
He had been gone for 3 days when I was driving home during work, to pick something up, I noticed it on the side of the road.......... there he was. Shorty.
He was running not walking up the freaking sidewalk to my house. It took him 3 or 4 days but the SOB had walked from the golf course back to my house! It's about 2 miles distance between the two places. I stopped and opened the door and he jumped in. I took him back to the shop. By the way, have you ever driven a cat in a car before? It can be hectic but he stood on the seat back taking in everything including speed, direction, time and what roads we were taking and yet he still found time to swipe my face with his tail every couple of minutes. I will never forget
the elation on, my co-worker, Don's face. We celebrated our prized mouse catcher's return to work!
Then 2 days later he was gone again. We hoped he just took a vacation again and we were right! He walked up to the house again! I got up to go to work and he was waiting patiently in the garage for me to come out. I put him in my truck and went back inside to put my shoes on. As I installed my shoes, I heard a horn honking which is unusual at 5:30am. Plus, the honking was coming from the garage. I ran out to shut the noise down to keep it from waking the whole neighborhood. I wasn't ready for what I saw. Shorty the cat standing on his hind legs and pushing the horn like this, honk-honk.......honk.........honk-honk. I'm not sure but I think he was sending a distress signal to other cats in the area. I couldn't believe my eyes or ears. I had to tell the cat to stop honking the horn at 5:30 in the morning! Which he did. I got him to the shop as quickly as possible and he stayed there for a few weeks until Mrs. Evans called early one morning after I'd gone to work to say "That *#%&ing cat is in our kitchen!" She put him out, got in the shower and by the time I arrived he was already back in the house sitting there 5 feet away from the sleeping dog just watching everything.
Then he was gone for week and we went hiking that weekend and found out later when Don came to check on Pumper, Shorty the cat was laid out in the spare bedroom right in the middle of the bed sleeping. When he was returned to work Don noticed Shorty had a 1" sized hole in the middle of his back and he couldn't walk. We figured he was attacked by a bird of prey. He was so traumatized he wouldn't tell us anything about it. We thought he would be dead by the next day. He just laid on the ground like a dead cat. But, he pulled out of it and after a week of recovery he was back to work and all was fine. Then he disappeared for good while I was in rehab. We never saw him lying in the road. Never saw him on the course. We just never saw him again. As cats go, he was a keeper. He never complained and never bit or clawed anyone. He was one of our best workers and is sorely missed.
After talking to the neighbors, we found out that Shorty (the little whore) was two-timing us by spending nights at their house under the name of Buster during his trips to our house.
