Schrödinger's Secret

So The Wife and I are getting ready to take the cats in to be shaved again on Saturday. Jordan is easy; she's easily lured by treats and generally pretty passive once you pick her up. Ginger, the prima donna, is much more wily and scared of things -- including the cat carrier, which absolutely terrifies her.

Now, we've been down this road many times before, which is why The Wife restrains her and I bring the carrier into a room that we close all of the doors to, so as to limit her ability to get away. Saturday, we have selected the spare bedroom, which is where the cats sleep at night anyway.

So when Ginger the cat figures out that something's up that involves the cat carrier, she freaks. She twists out of The Wife's grip, and starting running around everywhere. She hides under the dresser. We reach in and she scurries under a bedside table. We pull the cloth away from the table, and she runs under the bed itself, scrunched down as low to the ground as she can, and situated as close to exactly in the middle of the bed as she can, so as to be out of the reach of both people, on either side of the bed.

I've gotten a roll of wrapping paper to prod her out of her location, hopefully to get her moving towards The Wife so she can be the goalie and catch the cat. I get down on my belly, and reach in with the paper to poke at the panicked cat, and she moves just a bit. I poke again, and she darts down to the foot of the bed. I see her turn around and jump up. "She's on top of the bed!" I say, to alert The Wife where the cat has got to. We both stand up.

The cat is not on top of the bed. She isn't underneath any of the covers. She isn't in the pillows. She's not under the bed table. She's not under the bed. She's not in the closet. She's not under the dresser. She's not anywhere. Jordan, in her cat carrier, starts making little cat-grunt noises, which I'm sure means that she's laughing at us.

The Wife and I both start laughing, too -- where could the little prima donna have gone? Cat's don't just go into boxes and vanish into some ambiguous existential state. We've looked everywhere that's cat-accessible, and she hasn't teleported away or become invisible. I get back down underneath the bed, and I notice that there is a tear at the fabric underneath the box spring.

"She's in the box spring, sweetie," I say, before I know for sure that I'm right, and I start poking at the depressions in the fabric with my wrapping paper "stick." Sure enough, one of them weighs and lot and meows. The cat jumped inside the box spring, and she's retreated to the far back end of it.

If you've never before looked inside a box spring to find a panicked cat, you might be surprised to find that it looks really scary in there. The inside of one of those things is filled with what look like thin steel spikes, and aside from that, the whole thing is made up of one-by-two and two-by-three pieces of lumber forming a skeleton, around which the gauze and cushioning are wrapped. It's no place for a scared kitty, and certainly no place you'd want to stick your arms into to get the scared kitty.

So this means we have to take the bed apart and pull up the box spring, to tilt it vertically and dump out the cat inside. This is familiar territory for getting a scared Ginger into a carrier. Ginger gave up after that. We re-assembled the bed after collecting and securing Ginger, putting the torn section underneath one of the supports so that it will be difficult for her to get inside.

Now we know the cat's ultra-secret hiding spot. Hopefully, we've restrained access to it such that she can never again get in there. The lesson is that cats are pretty clever when they want to be.