Another day with Rascal

Earlier I had mentioned that Rascal was caught in a junkyard.  No one is sure how long he lived there.  A person placed a trap to catch other cats she had seen in the junkyard since it was the beginning of December and getting cold, and after the trap was out for only one day also caught Rascal.  The former owner of Rascal also owned a motel in Columbia Falls and said Rascal lived there.  But she said that Rascal liked to roam around.

Rascal likes to lay under the bed in my bedroom.  He comes out when I go to bed so I can pet him.  I don't think he spends the night on the bed as he isn't there when I wake up.  But when Rascal hears I am awake in the morning he jumps up on the bed.  Other times of the day when I enter the bedroom and sit on the bed he will come out from under the bed so I can pet him. This afternoon when it was time for me to go and do some work, Rascal put his claws into my flannel shirt and tried to stop me from leaving him.  Some times he seems to hear something I can't hear as he looks to be hearing something, and then he will go back under the bed.

Rascal will only go out of the bedroom to eat and use the litter box.  This evening I tried to coax him out of the bedroom to join me by the woodstove in the hallway area.  He would come to the door but not out of the room.  So I picked him up.  As soon as I exited the bedroom Rascal panicked and squirmed out of my hands scratching one of my fingers.  As soon as he hit the ground he took off.  Since I had closed the bedroom door he took off to another room.  I waited and waited and called for him but he wouldn't come.  Later when I looked for him I saw him run back to my bedroom as I had now left the bedroom door open.

Patti, a friend of mine, said Rascal looks like a Norwegian Forest cat. 

"He is a more little like a “normal” long hair around the face, but the cat sites on the internet say that one way to distinguish the Norwegian Forest cat from other long hairs is that they have a mane."

I looked at photos of Norwegian Forest cats, and Rascal does look like one.   Especially when he sits.  His fur around his neck looks like a mane.   This afternoon I tried to trim some of his mane as earlier I had seen the long neck hair got in the way of some of his grooming.  I was able to only trim a little of his fur as he is almost constantly in motion.

So we are working at increasing our bond together.  Hopefully it won't take much longer for him to relax and go about the entire house.