Seamus has never yet met a hole he didn’t need to poke his nose into.

There was the hollow stump containing a sleeping skunk (it ended well; they politely sniffed noses and each went their separate way).

There was the hollow log; After a long day of hiking, Seamus had had enough and was getting sleepy, so he found a hollow log and stepped in for a nap (first picture). Trying to coax him out with treats moved him not at all; beating on the other end of the log just made him squinch his eyes shut in annoyance; trying to dislodge him with a long stick made him retreat further inside the log. In the end, I sat outside in the rain for 2 hours until he finished his nap and came sauntering out to finish the hike. After that, I got smart, and when I noticed him taking an inordinate interest in holes at the end of long hiking days, I put his harness on and offered to carry him if he looked like he was flagging.

And then there was the day he jumped down into a wall at a friend’s camp. In the end, we had to knock a hole in the wall to get him out. We also found an unopened bottle of fine whiskey, 2 cribbage boards, a game of Snakes and Ladders, multiple mouse skeletons, and various other things. Apparently, this was a recurring issue.

(And as judyhume just reminded me in the comments, there was the kayak trip in Kejimkujic Nat’l Park. Seamus followed his nose into a hole containing poison ivy (cats don’t react to it but I am very allergic). It was a long cold rainy day. Seamus trotted along on the portages like a trooper, and when we finally got the tents set up he was more than ready to go inside to get warm and dry. But no; I took him down to the lake, dunked him and scrubbed him down. Poor cat! My penance was to sleep that night with a very damp cat snuggled up next to me in my sleeping bag.)

So Seamus and deep, dark holes have a long history.

Enough of this - on to the knitting!
Now that he is getting older, he feels the cold more, so I want to create a warm bed for him. It will be enclosed to maintain body heat, and will have a large pocket in the base for a hot-water bottle, and padding to make the base level while holding it.

I want it to look like a hollow stump. I will be using all my various brown shades of Briggs and Little yarn, holding three strands together to approximate bulky yarn. I will be placing random cables to look like bark. In the end I plan to felt it. Then I will decorate it with mushrooms, ferns, mosses, insects, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I’ll probably use embroidery, felting, knitting, and crochet for the embellishments.

It looks glorious and magnificent in my imagination - hmm - we’ll see how the reality turns out.

May 2019:
Almost finished. Judging by how much Seamus is sitting on top of this and in it while I am trying to work on it, I think he likes it.

Plants and animals on Seamus’ tree stump:

• Sphagnum moss and Polypody fern
• blueberry
• Kinnikinnik (bearberry)
• mushrooms (Pholiota)
• red eft (eastern newt)
• lady beetle
• resting Luna moth
• grass snake (eats insects, not voles)
• vole
• a few early fallen leaves

Finally Finished! It took a few iterations to put it together in a way I liked. I ended up using a packing foam to stiffen the edges, cutting so it conformed to the tapering shape of the stump. I used heavy cardboard sewn onto the top to support that, and then I sewed the knitted top of the stump on that.

It was a ridiculous amount of work, but Seamus loves it! The silly boy kept climbing on top of it or into it as I was working on it.