Meet Jake

In other summer news, we came out our kitchen door one afternoon to find that we had a visitor.  He was thin to the point of being emaciated, but very friendly...and even friendlier after we'd offered him a meal.   A few days went by, and it quickly became clear that our new friend had no other home to go to.  So (in an admittedly blatant abuse of a guest's trust) we popped him into a carrier and took him to see the vet. 

We found to our surprise that our little friend had a micro-chip.  But if we cherished illusions that we would soon be restoring him to a loving home, they were quickly dashed.  The last entry in the microchip database was 2007, and the address and phone numbers for his prior person were no longer current.  We tried searching on the name, on Facebook, on lost pet forums and at the local humane society and everywhere else we could think of with no luck.  About the only thing we found out for sure was his name- Jake.  We took Jake home with us, and gave him his privacy in the basement, while we set about trying to get a little meat on poor Jake's bones. 

Shortly thereafter Jake's tests came back from the vet showing that he had not picked up any dangerous illnesses in his long hungry ordeal, and so we introduced Jake to Biscuit and Cookie.  There was surprisingly little acrimony, though Cookie in particular was quite weirded out.  He still hadn't figured out how Biscuit joined us, and now here was another cat joining the household. 

Jake seems to have been used to being on his own.  He found Cookie and Biscuit to be rather uninteresting, especially compared to the cornucopia of cat food now available to him.  But the house has many interesting places to explore and nap. 

You'll note that Jake kind of resembles Cookie- though where Cookie has a flourishing white handlebar mustache, Jake favors a small tidy French mustache.  (It's possible Jake is short for Jacques- we don't know for sure.)

Cookie is starting to get used to Jake, though he still gives Jake a wide berth and frequent suspicious looks.  Biscuit keeps trying to entice Jake to play, bouncing out from behind furniture at him and then tearing around the house.  Jake is quite baffled by this, and gives Biscuit a look I interpret as, "What on earth was that about?!"

Now that Jake is starting to put on some weight, he's gone from surprised pleasure at each meal to wild enthusiasm. And it's a tossup who will try first to push Biscuit's nose out of his kibble- Jake or Cookie. 

Still a certain amount of settling in to do, but unless Jake's old family puts in a belated appearance, it looks like we have a new addition to the household.