We have a mystery here.
As you know, we have a fish pond. A very smart one took the place of the old half wine-barrel, where the fish swam in circles as they grew. It took them a few days to discover that they could swim in ovals, straight lines and big sweeps of the new, up-market pond, but once they were settled they explored with gusto!
We bought a few more, a couple died, and two we saved from 'suffocating' by throwing them back into the water when they jumped out. One lost it's tail as it dried out due to being out of the water for so long, but amazingly, the tail actually grew again!! For a while the fish swam a bit oddly, but up until two nights ago, all was well.
Then, it disappeared. Overnight. In the evening it was there, the next morning when I went to feed them (an even day, my turn to do the chores), it was not there! At all. We went to bed being the owners of five fish, and woke up being the owners of four! I doubted myself actually and had to ask Rob how many fish we had, he confirmed that we definitely had five.
And we have no idea where it went! We thought immediately that Basil had gone to 'play' with them, but he had been on the bed all night (it's getting cooler now and he likes his comforts), and the other three were dotted about in their usual places. And nobody had 'fishy breath'.
No stones were dislodged from around the pond, nothing was amiss, except we were one fish short.
Rob thinks it may have been Blackjack/jackie, a feral black cat who is the image of our Daffy. I put food out every evening for him/her as I cannot bear to think of him starving. I know that he drinks from the pond, all the cats do, but I somehow cannot agree that he managed to catch the fish that spends the night at the bottom of the pond, without dislodging rocks. I think that the victim leaped out of the water on a suicide mission, and was found by a hungry someone later!
We'll never know!
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