Mystery solved

I’m certainly glad I got the snow blowing around the house when I did! A bitter wind has reached us. When checking the weather early this morning, the temperature was a very mild -9C, but the wind chill was -32C!!! While doing my rounds, sections of the paths I’d made were already drifted over, and the deer feed I put out was soon covered as well. Most alarmingly were the sounds of creaking that I was able to narrow down to the willows in the south yard – the ones we need to cut away from the power lines.

I’m going to be very relieved, once we finally get those trees cut back!!!

Today, we even got severe weather warnings, due to expected wind chills tonight reaching -40C to -43C. The actual temperatures are only supposed to drop to about -28C tonight.

I’m really looking forward to this winter being over.

While we’ve been happily staying indoors and out of the wind, we had a bit of a mystery that we weren’t sure was even a mystery, solved!

We have another outside cat.

Every now and then, I would look out the bathroom window at night and see Slick sitting on the cat cave we made in there, looking back at me. With only the light from the bathroom shining in, sometimes I would do a double take and wonder, what cat is that? That’s not Slick, is it? So I’d be squinting through the frost on the bottom of the window, or the fog of my own breath on the glass (being short sucks, sometimes), trying to figure it out, before finally decided that it’s not Nicky the Nose and not Ferdinand, so it must be Slick. The white triangle on his nose makes his face more distinctive, but sometimes he looked a lot rougher than usual.

The other day, my older daughter had joined me while I was at my computer. She was facing the north windows when a cat started climbing up to the roof. Not an uncommon sight. We both looked out the window to try and identify which cat it was, as the tree trunk hid most of it. I caught a flash of a white triangle on the nose and said, oh, that’s Slick.

It can’t be Slick, my daughter tells me. She had just seen him out the bathroom window, in the sun room. Just in case, though, she went back to check.

Slick was still in the sun room.

So if Slick is in the sun room, what cat just went up the tree?

Which is when her sister was able to get a couple of pictures through their window of this really beat up looking version of Slick, with the most tragic expression on his face.

As you can see by the two photos, there isn’t a lot of difference between the two. The most distinctive is that Not-Slick’s white nose patch extends higher up into his forehead. His face is also more jowly, with a blackish nose and lips, but you can’t always see those.

This means we have 4 toms hanging around, not just three. And while Not-Slick does come into the sun room – in fact, when I looked out the bathroom window before starting this post, I found Not-Slick looking back at me – I have never seen him in there when I come out with the food and water. Slick, on the other hand, has become comfortable enough to stay in the sun room while I’m refilling food and water bowls.

I’m going to go through some of my old pictures and see if I inadvertently got pictures of this cat, thinking it was Slick!

The Re-Farmer

Update: Oh, my goodness! I HAVE got pictures of Not-Slick! I found this one, taken back in December. He was stuck at the doorway, with Ferdinand blocking his escape. I even have it noted in the file name, “new cat.”