The cat was shot. Afterwards, his skin and skeleton went to the museum and were preserved. It is not an ending I would wish on a cat, even one whose personnel file offers little in his defence.
Animals from the zoo did sometimes enter the natural history collection after they died. This case was different. The cat had never belonged to the zoo. He arrived uninvited, caused trouble and ended up in a collection anyway. The administration even found an accession number for this particular career: NH:1906.483.1.
That is about as far as the surviving account takes us. No name, no thrilling account of a chase, no list of the animals involved. Invent those details and you might get a better legend. The small true story is odd enough: an intruder at the zoo survived in the record because somebody carefully noted where the museum’s new cat had come from.
