One morning we all got up to find Sammy gone and realized that he’d stayed out all night (we always bring him in nightly because of the coyotes that live in the field behind our house). The boys finally found him inside the small tool shed; he must have strayed inside while my husband was working outside the day before and got trapped inside (he knows he’s not allowed inside, but he’s a cat). Turns out he had a reason to be there; when the boys let Sammy out they heard a little plaintive call of a cat. It came from behind the wall of the shed! We realized to our horror that a cat was trapped behind the inner wall. Herb quickly figured out that it must have crawled into a small opening at the roof and fallen down a good nine feet between the cramped outer and inner walls. Herb set quickly to work, hacking open the wall to free the poor thing. When we finally got him out, he was a mess, blind and pussy and (pardon) literally rotting. My son and I rushed him to the vet (with blind thoughts of adopting him) who pronounced him too far gone: he’d hurt himself in the fall and had literally starved to death over the course of a few weeks and during the entrapment he’d been infected by vermin (it only takes a few days, apparently for that to start) which had eaten him alive. The vet then euthenized the cat. Herb closed up the gap in the shed roof so no other event like that one could occur again. I can’t look at the shed anymore and not think of his suffering. I have no words to describe how that makes me feel. I’m haunted by it. What ifs…I keep thinking, what if I had checked when I’d first heard those calls? What if?…