10 million pets go missing per year in America, according to the Animal Humane Society. That totals about one in three furry, occasionally scaly or slimy, friends going missing in their lifetime.

In 2026, one of those was a mocha house-cat that moved about by dancing the worm.

It started as an uneventful gym walk, too many mosquitoes. Auburn Hills feel more swamp than civilized this time of night.

In my periphery, I caught a stir racing to the dumpster, low-down like. A lump of fur, waddling through the darkness.

Eons of evolution have trained the human brain for exactly these sorts of calculations. The brain of any successful living thing NEEDS to identify the rapidly moving figure cloaked in velvety darkness. My senses immediately spiked. My inner paranoid journalist recounted that there have been increasing accounts of odd wildlife incursions in the area.

Rats. By the Detroit Tigers? And bears. Oh my.

Too big for a rat.

Too clumsy and odd for a wounded cub.

Disqualified.

The supercomputer of the human brain kept firing.

Raccoon?

Nah. Too close to broken glass. Unfamiliar with trash.

Having removed the most undesirable random encounters, I reached a conclusion. At the very same moment I locked eyes with a pair of blistering golden eyes.

A color more often seen by treasure hunters in virgin tombs lost in deserts than Michigan swamps.

A cat.

It looked, in the classic sleight-of-hand of evening, to be one of mine.

I mustered the friendliest, “pspspspspspspspspspsps,” human lips can form– the known siren song of all felines– and it approached gracefully. A friend.

No collar. But it acted distinctly like an animal with a home.

After performing the necessary wellness checks on my furballs, I returned to the dumpster. It had slouched into the twilight, vanished.

Like ships passing in the sea, I returned to my gym run. I thought nothing of it.

A cat. That looked like a rat. Lost to the seduction of crickets and rotting chicken, but it was polite.

The next day came. Coffee was hot. The breeze was cold.

After completing some miscellaneous busywork with my girlfriend, we retired to a walk. The nature of the assignment was quickly hijacked by a wanted poster.

Not for an outlaw.

But for a lost cat. That looked like a rat. A cute rat.

But with a gentleman’s bowtie. Like Butch Cassidy.

But she had a nice smile.

Lily.

The northern Michigan in my blood quickly pumped ancestral memories straight into each of my functioning organs. Generations of trapping, tracking and hunting in the land that gets more south the more north you go.

I became the hero in my own southern gothic. Right in my backyard, laying traps and treats under weeping willows.

While I was playing Matthew McConaughey on season seven of True Detective, my girlfriend was establishing a line of dialogue with the number posted on the sign. I rallied the local community. Two of my most nature-freakish neighbors, each equipped with motion cameras and traps of their own, were brought onto the hunt.

The cat-mom was a sweet lady. During a heated breakup, her feline companion decided to straighten up and fly right– out the front door left wide open by her clumsy now ex.

Typical behavior, guys. Pandora might have opened the box. But we left the door open for all the evil to get out.

She was out for the night on a party boat in Detroit to escape the tag team of misery: a breakup and a lost cat. The bare minimum acceptable response to the situation, quite frankly.

Amidst this chat, I noticed movement.

I claim no relation to Jim Corbett. But it was with his knowledge of the tigress that I could identify the surgical bites taken out of the bait.

The stripes move in thick brush, darkness imitating darkness.

We tracked her to a crooked, moody oak tree in a swampy crag that looked like it was reaching for its trusty revolver.

In a maneuver made famous by Steve Irwin, my girlfriend and I safely lured the creature from the bayou into my study with love. We sent the message she was waiting on, envisioning in every champagne bubble escaping into the air over the Detroit River.

“We found her!!!!”

The bubbles put her to sleep too. We spent the night getting attached to a meek grey girl who moved like a worm.

When the owner came to meet us in the morning, she was greeted by disappointment.

It was an exceptional cat. It became our best friend overnight.

She had a cute smile. But her lips and belly were not quite right.

But it was not her cat.

It also was not a stray.

It had a home.

She agreed to take her if we could not identify its owner at the Humane Society and after exploring all other avenues.

We quickly jailed the poor girl in our pet carrier and politely erupted through the glass doors to finally put this mystery to bed.

After a short emotional eternity with this girl, knowing well it was the last time we may ever see her, the clerk approached with the chip reader of truth.

*PING***

Two percent of cats that make it to shelters are ever reunited with their owners. With a microchip, that number jumps closer to 40%.

Our damsel in distress, with a fish-hooked lip, was named Wormie. Apt for a cat that waddled like a worm.

I then filled out an application for if she went unclaimed to begin the process of rehoming her with Lily’s mom.

She was reclaimed before we were hungry for our next meal.

It felt bittersweet.

One cat returned home. But one stayed lost in the swamp.

Cats are like a flat circle. One person had the best day of their year; one person’s heart was still broken twice.

Just as I was ready to grow out my hair, lose weight, and get really depressed– my girlfriend got a text from our new friend– Lily’s mom.

Lily got picked up on one of the cameras.

I noticed too, even on the stupor of my blues, that something keeps eating my meat out in that cruel swamp.

The cat caper continues.

Alright alright alright…