Early in 2023, I realized, due to occasional thumping just after dark, that I had some sort of animal living in the wall of my home office. I wanted to capture it, but I had loaned my medium size cage trap to a Korean family, and it had not been returned. I ordered a new one. Soon after it arrived, the Koreans returned the old one, of course.
My first suspicion was raccoon. I put the trap under the house, baited with marshmallows, a preferred raccoon bait with the added feature that it doesn't attract cats. Days later, it was still baited, and a couple of marshmallows I had put out in front of it as free samples were still there.
I decided to bait the trap with cooked chicken wings, reputed to catch everything but rats (they are vegetarian). I didn't have any, and forgot to get any, so the trap was still left with the marshmallows.
some days later, I heard the thumping in the wall, then a bit later went out into the kitchen. There I heard very loud meowing. I went out the side door to investigate, and meowed back. Then I realized there was a cat in my trap. Curiosity had caged the cat - he'd just gone in to check it out.
I pulled out the trap, and in it was a gorgeous cat. Light cream face, darker cream body with overlapping medium brown and dark brown splotches, and very well groomed. I thought for awhile what to do, then figured the path of least resistance was to let it out, which I did. He ran away at amazing speed.
I had started to block the entrance to under the house, but decided, since we sometimes have rats around here, that perhaps a night prowling cat was a good idea, and he wasn't causing any trouble in the wall. His thumping was never more than a few seconds in the evening. He was back in the wall before midnight.
We had some very heavy rains when a cat couldn't go out and hunt, so I started leaving him some cat food, which I continued to do after the rain. I had been assured that feeding a cat does not reduce its predatory instincts.
Wally obviously wanted to be a wild cat, and had no interest whatever in being a house cat - but in the early morning hours of April 27, 2023, he apparently suffered the consequences. Nature can be very harsh.
At 3:10 in the morning I heard commotion under the house near my office. Then I heard a loud panicked scream from a cat, actually, one and a half screams. It sounded like a cat being crushed. Then there was silence. It was obvious to me that a larger predator had gone under the house and killed Wally Wallcat.
I got up, went out, and shined a powerful flashlight beam under the house. I could see nothing due to boxes in the way. I left the cat's food bowl filled, and three days later it was still untouched.
So I wrote this obituary for Wally Wallcat.
Sunday evening I was at my computer station in the office, when I heard, just after darkness had fallen, thumping in the wall, for just a few seconds as usual. I went out and saw that the food bowl was empty, so I refilled it. Monday morning it was empty again.
Wally Wallcat was back! So what actually happened that night? I haven't a clue.