The Search for Wolf

Wolf is a skinny old cat, 18 years old, about 5 pounds.  He went outside about 9 PM Monday night, and he wasn't in the house Tuesday morning.  Amy, a friend of mine, took her search dog Harley out to look in the woods for Wolf.  The trouble is, Wolf is Harley's kitty, and Wolf's scent is everywhere, so Harley isn't that good at finding Wolf sometimes.  Harley did find the remains of a cat, however.  The little that was left seemed to have come from a recent kill.  Amy asked if Kelsy and I might be able to help. 

I said we would try, even though this isn't our optimal sort of search.  Kelsy finds dogs, mostly, and finding cats is usually a different process.  I brought Kelsy over just to see what she would find.  Kelsy was very interested in a spot in the yard, as if some event had happened there.  I could see her reading the earth like a book, and I imagined she was reading the story of a struggle.  Kelsy took is into the woods, mostly along the same path Harley had taken earlier.  Kelsy found the same remains, and she led us deeper into the woods to the remains of a small rodent and a crow.  Kelsy and I didn't give Amy much new information.  Amy examined the little material she could find, and she thought it looked like it came from Wolf. 

It turned out, however, that Wolf was safe and warm in a neighbor's house, who mistook him for a stray and tried to help him.  Wolf is safe at home now, and we don't know whose remains we found in the woods.  We did see a flier for a missing cat, and that cat looked a lot like Wolfie.  Kelsy had started with a scent article of Wolf, taken from the freezer, and she got the signal to follow that trail.  Once we entered the dense undergrowth of the woods, we couldn't follow our usual procedures.  I think Kelsy just ended up following her nose to the next interesting smell. Kelsy unearthed information about the activities of predators in the woods, but it was hard for us to draw conclusions based on what we found.  Amy and I came to the wrong conclusion, thankfully.  Someone lost their cat, but it wasn't Wolf. 

Had it been someone besides Amy, I probably would have told them that such a search would not be Kelsy's strong suit.  Also, these kinds of searches are hard on Kelsy, I think.  Like the search for Cookie, Kelsy didn't get to find a happy animal at the end.  Fortunately, Kelsy got to search for Kody later in the day.