That Wascally Wabbit..er.. Cat!

Let me introduce you to Mange.  Well, his official name is Blackie and he, along with Merle, is an outside cat at the ol'homestead.  As you might infer from his name, he is a solid black cat.  He just roamed up and joined the crew a couple of years ago, and while he has recently become a little more friendly with me and mom (mostly because he's figured out that we feed him), he's never been overly comfortable with us.    His nickname is "Mange" because last summer, about the time Dad died, Blackie was looking really bad, losing big patches of fur and on a solid black cat, that look just isn't good because the underlying skin is stark white.  And he had a variety of raw patches on him.  Holly and I tried to get him in the carrier to take him to the vet, but he's a very slippery dude and always managed to elude us.  Between us, though, we had enough cat experience to diagnose him as having fleas and being highly allergic to them.  So we managed to treat him for fleas and the fur grew back.  Crisis resolved.   We've never managed to get him fixed, either.  Mom had an appointment scheduled, but, again, could not get him in a carrier.   Now I love cats.  I come home from work and Merle and Blackie always meet me either on the sidewalk or the porch.  Merle immediately flops on his back so I can scritch his tummy and Blackie, well, you can tell that he wants some love too, but he's leery of getting too close.  I can usually scritch his head for a second before he jumps just out of reach.  My heart breaks for poor Mange.  I want to love him, but there's BIG problem.   He's one sick puppy!  Since the day he showed up, he's has this upper respiratory funk – he snots and snuffles around.  He's a sick cat.  We can get the flea stuff on him, usually.  And we can put the worm medicine on his food, so we can treat him for that.  But the boy needs some antibiotics!  There is no doubt in my mind that ultimately Blackie was Patient Zero for the sickness that Sophie and Gizmo got this past winter.   Although the outdoor boys and the inside gang never co-mingle, they do sit and stare at each other through the glass front door and I can easily see germies crawling under the door and jumping on Sophie and Gizmo and their virgin immune systems.   Lately, he's gotten worse.  There's the usual snotting and sneezing, but his breathing is so loud and labored.  If I have my bedroom window open at night, I can hear him breathing on the front porch!  Mom and I talked about it over the weekend and we decided that since he was getting more friendly, we'd shove him in the carrier so mom could take him to the vet.  Of course, the down side to this is we'll probably never get him there again, so they'd have to keep him long enough to diagnose him and get him on the road to being treated or we'd have to have them put him to sleep.  But he really has the makings of a loving loyal cat, if he weren't so sick and wheezy.  Anyway that's the plan… Yeah.. hmm..   Ok, so Monday morning, mom gets up early so we can try to get Blackie in the carrier before I leave, and it'll definitely be a two-man effort.  We started out by putting the carrier out on the porch Sunday afternoon, so the boys could get used to its presence and not be scared of it.  Well, that plan worked.  When I woke up and looked out the window, there was a cat sound asleep inside the carrier.  Only it was the WRONG CAT!  Yup, Merle was asleep in the carrier and Blackie was sleeping on the porch beside the carrier.  Not a problem.   We go outside and put down their breakfast and fresh water and attempted to sneak up on him and shove him in the carrier… he runs.  But he stays on the porch, so this is a positive development.  Now, I could bore you with details here, but suffice it to say that we tried for about 30-45 minutes to get him in that carrier, and by the end of that time, my shoes and the bottom two inches of my pant legs were soaked from the extremely heavy dew we'd had the night before… and I had to go to work.  Back to the drawing board.   Tuesday, mom realized that we had a sturdy wire cage in the garage that my dog-owning aunt and uncle had lent us.  So she dragged it up on the porch and put some food in it to try to snare Blackie.  Surprisingly, we got Blackie in the cage pretty easily, too easily.  With Blackie in the cage, mom went back inside the house and I was outside weed-eating the front bank and I turn around and notice Blackie isn't in the cage anymore.  I go inside and ask mom, "Why did you let him out?" and she replied, "I didn't."  Well, he managed to get himself out of the cage.  Back to the drawing board.   Last night, we again easily get him inside the cage and in order to avoid his getting the door open again, I used one of those plastic pull-tie thingees that Dad seemed to have in abundance in the junk drawer in the kitchen.  And we put the cage, with the door to the wall, smack in the corner, AND I put a heavy flower planter that was full of dirt on top of it, so he couldn't move the thing.  Blackie was spending the night in that cage!   So this morning, the plan is that I'll get the cage in the van before I leave for work and mom'll be up and ready to go.  She's all dressed.  I get ready.  We open the front door and there's Blackie, on the front porch.  We don't know how, but the little scrounger got himself out of the cage!  Obviously we should have named him Harry Houdini!  Upon further investigation, we see that he managed, despite the absence of opposable thumbs, to rip one of the metal bars off and open a space for him to squeeze out.  Cats, of course, have the ability to squeeze their bodies through the tiniest of spaces – this space was, at the most, 2 x 3 inches big.   As you can see, I'm beginning to feel like Elmer Fudd and I'm going to have to apologize to Tom for my comments regarding him and the birdfeeder/raccoon incident… and you know I don't want to have to apologize to Tom!   The good thing is, as Mom pointed out, Blackie doesn't seem to be holding our attempts to catch him against us.