Leah has been wanting Dusty to come inside like Chloe, Sylvester and Smokey for a long time. She has brought him in occasionally but he cries so pitifully that Leah always lets him go back outside. Saturday night she decided to try again. This is where he ended up.

He spent most of the night there at the foot of the bed with his mama, on Leah’s side, of course. He got up very early and wanted out, but while he was inside, he seemed not exactly happy but at least not exactly frantic to get out. He didn’t wander too much before he settled down, and he didn’t cry. He wasn’t sure he wanted me in the same bed but didn’t object too much as long as I kept to my own side.

On Sunday night Leah brought him in again. This time he did not like it. He wandered around meowing and craning his neck like he was trying to see over a fence. He went to the front door and stared out, then wandered a little more, and then back to the door. Leah finally gave up and let him out.

It’s not too bad for him outside. We have four cat houses on the front porch, two with soft bedding, and two with heated pads. He stays in the unheated houses most of the time. It hasn’t been particularly cold this fall, so I think he can be comfortable there. Since he won’t get in the heated houses (he got used to the other houses before we got the heated ones), we’re going to put the heating pads in the other houses.

The wind has been very strong all day Monday ahead of a cold front and Dusty is nowhere to be found. He’s probably hiding in the woods because the wind scares him. The cold front is supposed to bring some fairly heavy rain later tonight. We’re hoping he gets back on the porch before the rain arrives.

Our menagerie seems to be settling into the new location. Smokey is his usual self, looking for food first, and then affection.

Leah has been worried about where Dusty and sometimes Chloe will go when it gets cold, assuming that it ever does. We put two cat houses on the front porch, where Leah feeds those two cats. One house is a store-bought dog/cat house. Since Chloe doesn’t want to be too close to Dusty, we thought we should have another house, so we made one by cutting a door into a plastic storage box. We were surprised on Thursday to find both cats sharing the dog/cat house.

I’m pretty sure this is as close to Heaven as Dusty gets these days. I’m pretty sure Chloe doesn’t feel the same.

The cats finally seem to have reached some kind of equilibrium at the new house. They all seem to be reliably around for at least part of the day, usually either early morning or late afternoon.

Smokey is the most consistent, which I think is probably to be expected. He’s not particularly active under any circumstances, so he seems content to hang out around his pen.

The other three cats disappear for hours at a time, but they all seem to end up back somewhere near their pens or the garage. Chloe spends at least part of the night in the garage, which at this point does not have doors and is still full of stored items and construction material. If she’s around, she usually follows me and the dogs down to the street, then climbs up the bank into the woods in front of our house. From there we don’t know where she goes.

Sylvester seems to come and go, but he is not gone enough for us to worry that he won’t be back. Wednesday night he found his old scratching post in the garage and spent some time wallowing where we put catnip.

Dusty is usually absent, but I suspect that he is somewhere in the woods surrounding the house.

Any one of them might go back to the old house, but, wherever they go, they have come back every time.

Our biggest concern is that Smokey and Sylvester will start harassing Dusty and chase him away. On several occasions we have seen Dusty lying peacefully under our trailer, when Smokey will walk up and lie down a couple of feet away, acting innocent. Staring. Staring. We have also caught Sylvester stalking Chloe or Dusty a few times, but have called him down in time to stop it.

Every day is different, but I think the cats are in the process of settling down into their new environment. They had a long time at our old house to find their favorite places to hang out, but only a week or so here.

Unfortunately, some time in the near future (we hope) there will be another big disturbance when we have our driveway paved. There will be one day of grading, which will involve a large bulldozer working on the driveway and in front of the garage. After that, there will be a day or so of putting down forms, which will involve a crew of strangers hammering stakes and generally making a commotion. And then there will be a day of pouring and working the concrete.

No one is going to be happy during the process. At this point we aren’t sure about putting them back in their pens or leaving them out when the workers come to the house.

Our four cats have spent a month confined to two pens after we moved to our new house. We had been advised to keep them inside for up to two months, and Leah’s cousin had given the encouraging opinion that once they were let out, they would disappear forever. But we couldn’t keep all four cats plus five litter boxes inside, and we couldn’t keep them confined to eight-by-eight pens forever. So on Wednesday morning, Leah let Chloe and Dusty out of their pens. And then we went into town to have our usual Wednesday huevos rancheros. We had done a test release Tuesday, and that went well enough. They stayed around, and Leah managed to catch them after a while and put them back into their pen.

On Wednesday, however, they were both gone when Leah got home from lunch. She called and called, but they didn’t show up. She went outside every half hour to check whether they had returned. Just before dark we got a text from the people who bought our old house, along with a photo of Dusty standing on the deck looking through the sliding glass door into their living room. A few minutes later she texted that she had seen Chloe, too.

We rounded up the carriers and some food and drove back to our old house. Chloe met us in the driveway and soon after Dusty came down, too.

Leah put out some food for Dusty and was able to grab him and put him into one of the carriers. Chloe played hard to get. Once she came close enough for Leah to touch her, but before Leah could put down the food tray she was holding, Chloe ran away. Chloe played tag until it was too dark to see, so we had to go back home with only one cat.

Leah was devastated, and, to tell the truth, I was worried. I thought it was the worst thing that could happen, short of having one of them run over. They had found their way back to what they thought of as their home, so why would they come back to the new house? We went to bed thinking we would try to get Chloe Thursday morning, but I was afraid that even if we did, she would go back to the old house, and keep on going back.

So, we woke up Thursday morning – or at least I woke up. Leah was already awake, having spent most of the night worrying. She went into the garage on the way to feed the other cats, and there was Chloe in the driveway, hungry and thirsty.

Chloe and Dusty have been outside all day. It’s getting dark as I write this, and Leah is outside feeding them again.

I think maybe both of them finally figured out what we hoped they would, that the new house is home. Leah hopes they don’t start going back and forth because there’s too much traffic.

Next up, Smokey and Sylvester get their turns.