Meet Tuxedo

I finally got some pictures of my little stray kitty, which is difficult because he doesn't stay still for long.  He's a mover, that one.  Constantly back and forth around the garage, up the steps to the kitchen door, smelling along the garage door edges, meowing at full bore if he's been in the garage too long.  The only time he's really still is when he's scarfing down his cat food.  Then he's off again.  He's even stopped in mid-meal to take a lap of the garage and check out everything.

Here is the best one I could take.  It does show his little face and his exceptionally long and thick tail.  That's the longest kitty tail I've ever seen!

 He has started to pay attention to the door into the kitchen.  Once I began going in and out of the house while he was in the garage and he got a glimpse of the interior, he became very curious.  I think it shows he knows about being inside houses.  But he wouldn't be the best indoor candidate right now because he has a terrible marking habit due to his territory battles with his nemesis, the big gray cat.  When he left this morning he jumped over the back fence as usual but paused by a large beach type ball the neighbor kids had left in that yard to give it a spray as if to say "My ball!"  Mercy!  

Here he is, off again, checking out the garage.  He's terribly hard to photograph.

The only semi-closeup of his face that I have gotten so far.  Not a great picture, but you can see the black dot on the end of his nose, which I think is pretty endearing.

Tuxedo is still skinny but is starting to fill out.  I wish I could get two meals a day into him, but the only time I see him is around 7:30 each morning.  He waits for me under the maple tree and I try to get outside at the same time each day;  I'm not sure how long he would wait if I were late and don't want to risk him missing his meal because I think it's all he gets to eat.

I couldn't get a picture of all the scrapes he's collected from fighting but you can sort of see one on his left shoulder blade in the second photo.  He got fairly beat up but he's healing.  

Today I tried something that worked surprisingly well.  I have been petting him and handling him as much as possible trying to get him used to it, and have picked him up several times.  He didn't fight back at all, just hung there in the air with my hands around his middle behind his front legs, looking a bit puzzled but not upset.  I gave him a good petting and some bologna after I put him down, trying to make favorable associations with being handled.  This morning, I was sitting on a step stool beside him as he ate;  he would take a break ever so often and rub against my legs.  He put his little front paws on my knee and stood up for me to pet his chin, so I just scooped him up and placed him on my lap.  And he liked it!  I started petting and he purred so loudly you could probably hear it outside.  No arguments, no clambering down - he took to laps better than my cat Molly - and he stayed there for several minutes without protest.  When I put him back down on the floor he resumed eating like nothing exceptional had happened.  He's amazingly tame with me.

Mind you, I still wear heavy gloves and thick pants around him, and am very careful, but this is no feral.  He was with people once, and has been abandoned.  I have great hopes that I can find a home for him.  He's a sweetie.