Houdini

With somewhere between 800 and 900 cats at the sanctuary, visitors and volunteers can find themselves making friends with cats whose names are a big "?"

Since I work inside, many of the cats in the front courtyard carry question marks.

Take Houdini:

This engaging, highly photogenic tuxedo cat visited and posed for me on two occasions several months apart before I finally cracked and asked Leslie just who he was.

It seems he got his name after proving a bit of an escape artist in his youth:

"When he was a really young kitten, he escaped through the bars of his cage a couple of times.  Then, when he returned to the shelter after being neutered, he somehow switched from the boys' cage to the girls' cage next door.  Since he was still feral at that point, I figured that the volunteers wouldn't have been able to handle him, so there must have been some hocus pocus involved!"

Meeting him now, it's hard to believe he came in as a feral. Leslie tells me he has two brothers at the sanctuary, Spot and Pongo, both as sweet-natured as he is.

Updated October 19, 2010: The latest in what's turned out to be a week of unfortunate passings, Houdini had to be put down this morning after his health had continued to deteriorate since late summer.

 Houdini & friend, April 2009

photo by Barbara Doduk