BOUTILIERS POINT, N.S. — The owl and the pussycat went to sea, only it wasn’t as pleasant as the poem made it out to be.
The night before hurricane Dorian, George, a 15-year-old part-Siamese cat, was hanging out on the upper deck at his waterfront home in Boutiliers Point.
Around 8 p.m., Patricia Seary, George’s owner, went and checked on him before heading downstairs to watch TV.
“He was just there and happy, so I left him,” Seary said in an interview Tuesday.
But when Seary went back to let George in, he was gone.
“The barricade to the stairs was still in place so we went and looked for him, but he wasn’t around,” Seary said.
Half an hour later, a soaking wet George reappeared on the deck.
“He was just sitting there, not a little bit wet, but like sopped,” Seary said.
Seary thought George went on an adventure down to the rocks and fell into the water.
“But as I’m drying him off, I turn him over and he has these two big rips in his skin and a little later and I noticed these puncture marks,” she said.
“That’s when I thought, ‘OK, this was not the rocks. This was a bird.’”
Seary took George into the vet, who agreed: George was the survivor of a failed kidnapping by a bird.
“We figured it tried to pick him up, struggled, and knocked him into the water,” Seary said.
Seary believes George, sitting at 6.1 kilograms, was plucked off the deck by a great horned owl, carried down to the water about 20 metres from the deck and then dropped into St. Margarets Bay.
“I had gone down to check the stairs we have coming up from the water and they were all wet, like splash marks or something,” she said.
“So the poor little guy swam home, climbed up the stairs, went across the lawn, climbed up all the other stairs and was just waiting for us to find him.”
Seary assumes George is most likely still alive because the bird only managed to dig into his skin and his weight made him too difficult to carry.
“Our daughter said, ‘It’s a good thing none of his diets ever worked because it was his heaviness that saved him,' ” Seary said.
George underwent an hour-long surgery to fix his internal injuries and ended up getting 20 stitches.
After many cat naps, George is now back in good health.
“The ridiculous thing is we thought he would never want to go out on that deck again, but as soon as we brought him back home he wanted to go back out,” Seary said.
"We think he must have a total mental block about the whole thing or something."
Either that, or George is betting on cats having nine lives.
