Lost Luna one…

Just look at Luna hiding in the chiminea the day before we lost her. So cute and happy, so content.

You know something isn’t right when your one year old white cat isn’t home by eight in the evening, particularly as she left the house at seven-thirty that morning. You know something is up when she hasn’t been back for one of her two hourly home-checks - just to be sure we haven’t moved whilst she’s been out adventuring. You definitely know something is wrong when she left without eating and fifteen hours later hasn’t been home for any her delicious nin-nins.

Thirty-nine hours might not seem like long, but when your feline friend – all purrs and scratches – goes missing for that length of time it feels like a lifetime.

Distraught probably sums up how we felt. Images of car accidents and broken limbs, fur-trading cat snatchers, evil garden protectors with spades and falls from tall trees ran through our minds. The fur-trader imaginings were the worse – nets and sharp stiletto knives – and increasingly common to fuel the German cat fur trade by all accounts. Of course we hoped she’d been locked in a shed or garage somewhere. It really does come to something when you hope that your cat is locked in small, dark space without food or water and the potential of days or weeks (maybe even months) of incarceration. Of course weeks would be too long and months would be an impossibility; even with a good supply of mice.

We trudged the streets calling her name, checked the alleys, drove around looking for signs of something white in the gutters, and scoured the tarmac for tyre prints and blood. My daughter printed posters and she and her grandmother walked miles pinning them to lamp posts. My wife delivered hundreds of flyers to houses asking them to check their sheds, a friend overseas said a spell for Luna, my Facebook friends sent me words of encouragement, the postman was asked to keep an eye out, vets contacted, groups of small boys encouraged to go searching. I sat and moped convinced that she was gone forever.

By ten o’clock on the second evening we had all given up hope except for Holly. We’d been hearing her bell all day only to find it was jangling keys or the swifts darting and twittering high in the air above. I must have seen her at the back window at least a dozen times only to realise, in a dashed hope manner, that it was actually the white paint of the window frame across the way.

Then Gaynor screamed as Luna appeared at the back window like a ghost.