The Search for Loki

Mu picked up the scent right away.

The Search for Loki

Loki is a gray cat, about a year old, indoor only.  He escaped a week ago, last seen running into the woods.  Mu and I arrived at Loki’s house at 8 AM.  Mu immediately took me into the open garage.  The owner hadn’t come out to meet us yet, but Mu was hot on a scent.  He whined like the garage was full of cats.  The garage was used for storage, not parking, with lots of places for a cat to hide.  I called the owner to come out because Mu was indicating a cat in the garage.  Mu took me to an old chair that was covered in cat fur, but it was from a fluffy orange and white cat, not a short-haired gray cat like Loki.  Loki’s owner said he didn’t know who the fluffy cat was, and he was unaware this cat had apparently been spending a lot of time in his garage.  Mu searched all over, but couldn’t pinpoint a cat.  Because the fur in the chair indicated a stray cat was using the garage, I made the assumption that the fluffy orange cat had run out after Mu started searching and was no longer in the garage.  Some of the fur we found from the orange cat indicated that it had been raked out by claws.  Either the orange cat had scratched out some of his own fur, or perhaps Loki had encountered this intruder and swatted him.

Not finding any cat in the garage, Mu and I continued the search of the surrounding area.  We had a hard time accessing the woods, and it took a while for us to find a way in.  Under the chain link fence, on a blackberry thorn, Mu found a single hair that looked like it probably came from Loki.  It seemed the gray cat probably went into the woods at some point.  Far away from the house, we found coyote scat, but it was old and dry, not recent.  We also found what I think might have been a footprint of a coyote puppy, although I’m not certain.  After several hours of searching, Mu found some remains in the woods.  It was the insides of an animal about the size of a cat or a raccoon, but none of the exterior of the animal could be found.  It was the stomach and intestines, and the liver and kidneys.  No bones or fur.  Mu sniffed at several spots of interest, and I tried to see if there were any traces of fur, so I could tell if it was a cat or a raccoon or some other animal, but I couldn’t find a single hair.  Complicating things, the area had cottonwood trees, so everything was covered in white fluff, making it harder to spot any bits of fur.

We went back to the house and I told Loki’s people that we found some remains that could possibly be Loki, but more likely it was some other animal.  I was talking to them about strategies going forward, setting the trap and camera.  As we were talking, they heard meowing from the back corner of the garage.  It was Loki!  I coached them on calming signals, and not to try to approach Loki, and within a couple of minutes, Loki came up to his owner.  They scooped him up and got him into the house, safe.

Did Mu find Loki in the first three minutes, and then we spent three hours tromping through the woods for nothing?  There was cat smell all over that garage, and the only fur we could find was from the intruder cat.  It is possible Loki was in there and he just moved from one hiding place to another as we searched.  It’s also possible that Loki came into the garage after the orange cat was displaced by Mu.  We will never know.

The video in the link shows Mu catching the scent of cats in the garage.  People often ask me, “How does Mu indicate a cat?”  This video is a good example of Mu’s behavior in the presence of a cat’s scent. Turn up the sound.