WILDLIFE -- A couple in Battle Ground, Wash., had a rude awakening this week when the family cat lured an uninvited guest through the "kitty door" into their house.  

Read on for the entertaining story from The (Vancouver) Columbian.

By John Branton

The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.

June 21--Let’s say you’re a pretty, gray, well-mannered cat named Cleo, and you just got adopted by Bill and Lou Ann Biscoe, who have a nice home in the woods several miles east of Battle Ground.

Your new family loves you and, for a cat adopted from an animal shelter, you’ve got a lot of freedom. You can roam the house and, when you take the notion, you can go outside through the pet door into a huge backyard with a five-foot fence.

A purrrfect world.

Or so it seemed until very early Monday. Bill Biscoe had left a fence gate open accidentally and you went out back. The Biscoes were sleeping peacefully, but you sensed you weren’t alone.

You locked eyes with something that looked like a medium-sized dog at first glance, maybe a wild, intriguing bad-boy dog. But it wasn’t wearing a black leather jacket, smoking cigarettes and combing its greasy hair back.

This bad boy was wild and ravenous, and liked nothing better than a nice big breakfast featuring cat du jour.

You kept your head though. You knew you probably wouldn’t be able to outrun a coyote over a great distance, but you remembered the pet door. If you could beat the coyote to the pet door, it wouldn’t go inside since it’s not a pet, right?

So you made your move and flew through the pet door, and the coyote was so close on your tail that it jumped through, too.

Then you’re running and jumping onto things and the coyote was doing the same, except it had never been inside a home. It clearly couldn’t remember how it got in here and figured it was trapped.

That’s when Lou Ann Biscoe heard something and alerted her husband.

“She woke me up and said, ’Something’s in our house,”’ Bill Biscoe said.

The Biscoes walked carefully to their family room and spotted the coyote there.

“It just started pooping and peeing and knocking things over,” Bill Biscoe said. “It was panicked. It was scared to death.”

The Biscoes just wanted the coyote to leave and thought it might if they gave it some time alone. They blocked the stairway upstairs with a couch.

“We waited about two hours and it never left, so we called 911,” Bill Biscoe said.

They figured an officer with Clark County Animal Protection and Control would arrive, with equipment to safely capture the coyote, but it was a sheriff’s deputy.

The deputy moved furniture around so there was only one avenue for the coyote to get out.

“He made a little exit,” Bill Biscoe said.

The deputy then climbed up onto the bar and tried to convince the animal to leave by poking a 2-by-4 board at it.

Finally, Bill Biscoe said, he figured they might lasso the coyote and went to get a rope.

“It ran outside just as I got back with the rope,” he added.

Finding itself in the backyard, the coyote, still stressed out, went into action.

“It panicked and jumped over the fence,” Bill Biscoe said. “It had a little struggle to get over, but it did.”

With the couple facing a big cleanup job because of the unwanted visitor, Lou Ann Biscoe locked the pet door and said she doesn’t plan to unlock it.

A good idea, considering that neighbors have captured images of deer, raccoons, bobcats, bears and even a cougar on their outside, motion-activated nighttime security cameras.

“It was a good-looking coyote,” Bill Biscoe said. “It looked like it was very well-fed, maybe had some cats.”

But not Cleo, who took her life in her paws, made a smart move and suffered not even a scratch in the ordeal.

Bill Biscoe said he has no problems with wild animals.

“We’re in their territory,” he said. “They’re not in ours.”