Rude awakening
Bob bolts awake, which causes me to wake up, and we hear Dinah talking downstairs. It's hard to describe . . . it's almost like barking or something. It's . . . I don't know. Like, "er -- er -- Mroww!! er -- er -- Mroww!!" Sort of like that. Bob rushed to the top of the stairs to look down, and called her, and she came into the hallway and he could see her, and she looked okay, so he came back to bed. She came upstairs then, and got a drink in the bathroom, then went to visit the litterbox, then came to bed.
We were lying there trying to figure out what the problem was. He said it scared him to death; he said it sounded like something was eating her.
Transcript of a conversation at 4:30 this morning.
Me: Maybe she was speaking a foreign language. Maybe she was talking to a squirrel.
Bob: There aren't any squirrels [unintelligible].
Me: What?
Bob: I said, there aren't any squirrels awake right now. Except the one lying next to me. Maybe she was walking to a nut! That would be you.
Then, about an hour later, Pyewacket jumped up on top of Bob's dresser and started bumbling around, knocking things off. A shameless bid for attention. "Yeah, everybody's all worried about Dinah. What about me??!!"
After I got up and went downstairs, I noticed that the basement door was ajar. It's a huge treat for the cats to get to go to the basement, especially Dinah. Any time Bob comes downstairs during the evening, she rushes to the basement door and starts slinking around, winding around and rubbing his legs and crying, and generally trying to persuade him to let her go downstairs. There are dangerous things down there, like fish hooks and piles of stuff that could fall over and crush her, so we usually don't let them go down without adult supervision.
But sometimes we get tired of waiting for them to come up, so we just leave the door open until they do. And last night we must have forgotten to close it, and I think Dinah must have been worried about it. Maybe that noise meant, "Help! Help! The basement door is open and I'm scared! And, and, Pyewacket might go down there and get in trouble! Help! Help!"
