It was Charles who became anxious first. Out in the garden watching for him after breakfast, he’d noticed a girl with a limping wolfhound come up the lane. Always suspicious since Seeley had been chased up a tree down there – why was the dog limping? he wondered. After that a gang of boys came past, pulling at branches and kicking stones. We’d better start to look for him, said Charles.
There were too many people about.
I went up to Mrs Pursey’s. She hadn’t seen him at all.
I came back and went, calling him persistently, up the Forestry Lane. Not right to the top. His range didn’t normally extend that far and I was wasting time, I thought.
If he was up there, he was safer than on the road. Better to concentrate on the hill.
Back to the cottage, up the hill once more – this time right to the Rose and Crown, and on up the next hill and along the lane that runs along the top of our woods and then dips 130
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to the valley again. I was passing the little paddock where, years before, I’d rescued Solomon by the scruff of his neck from an angry goose, when across in the Forest there was a fusillade of shots and my heart sank like a stone.
Rubbish, I told myself. People wouldn’t fire that many shots at a cat. Besides, the shots were well over in the Forest.
Or were they? Could they perhaps have been at the top of the Forestry lane, or in the beech wood? Sounds echo so much around here. It was too much of a coincidence, though, for Seeley to be missing for two hours and then run into a gang with guns. He’d be back by the time I got home.
He wasn’t. Charles, returning from searching the other tracks he might have taken, said there was no sign of him on any of them. All the same, we searched them again.
We called and hunted all day and the door stayed open all night. We went to bed at midnight from sheer exhaustion but at three in the morning, unable to sleep, I came down, went out into the garden and called again. I came down every night for a week, always hoping that this time he’d be there. One of my most desolate memories is of the yard door open, the darkness outside and the night wind blowing, and my going outside and calling and calling...
always without reply. The coldness permeated the living room where he and Shebalu had slept for so long. Their armchair was empty now. Shebalu slept with us upstairs.
We searched, and theorised – the whole village searched with us for weeks. But we never found any trace.
Could a fox have taken him? Hardly at nine o’clock on a summer’s morning, with Seeley having in the past stood up to big dogs and so many climbable trees around. In any case he would have put up a fight if he’d been attacked and, 131
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The Coming of Saska watching out for him as we’d done, we would have heard it. Could he have been bitten by an adder? There are lots of them round here. Seeley had been bitten as a kitten. He’d screamed so loudly then, though, that the whole valley had heard him, and we would have heard him this time. In any case, said a Vet whom I asked, he wouldn’t have collapsed on the spot. He’d have managed to get home.
All the same we checked the countryside all round the valley. We found no body. No trace of blood. No sign of cartridge cases in the Forestry lane. Neither were there any traps around; we searched every hedgerow for those. We combed the undergrowth on either side all the way up the hill in case he’d been hit by a car and had crawled away, though, so far as we know, no car had been around. The road ends in front of the cottage; after that it is a bridle track. Few strange cars come down here, and even then not fast – the hill is too steep and winding for that. We searched all the same, just in case. But there wasn’t a single sign.
Had there been a car parked at the top of the hill where we couldn’t see it, the occupants perhaps having gone for a walk, and Seeley, always a great one for poking around cars, had got into it and been carried off? Maybe, if that had happened, the people had turned him out when they found him, which could have been miles away. Maybe on the other hand, they were looking after him, not knowing where he’d got in. In case that had happened, and because he was so well known, after he’d been missing for almost a week, an appeal was put out in the newspapers and on radio and television, asking if anyone had seen him.
We got the first phone call, from a farmer forty miles away, within minutes of the television broadcast. There had been a large stray Siamese in one of his fields for the 132
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past five days, he said – catching the rabbits and sleeping in his haybarn. It was right by the side of the Castle Cary road where a passing car might have dumped him. Beside ourselves with joy – it must be Seeley, we thought; absolutely the right number of days that he’d been missing: and how many other big, dark-backed Siamese could there be astray in this pan of Somerset? – we drove down with his basket to fetch him. The farmer took us to the field and I called, but it was dark by this time and no cat came. After an hour we drove home – still sure it must be him – and were back again at first light next morning. It was lost, right enough.
And it was a seal-point Siamese. But it wasn’t Seeley.
We concealed our heartbreak. How strange, we said, that there should be another stray Siamese as well. The farmer said we needn’t worry, it wouldn’t be stray for long.
If its owner didn’t turn up he’d take it on himself. ‘Very intelligent, that cat is,’ he said. He was telling us! In its adversity it had found a haybarn to sleep in, rabbits for the eating, a stream to drink from nearby... and, if it so wanted, another home where it would be welcome, with a prosperous farmer under its thumb. We hoped that Seeley, if he was alive, had been equally fortunate. We hoped, even more, that we would find him. Then we drove back to the cottage where a friend, keeping vigil by the phone, reported that another call had come in.
Siamese cats get lost all right. In the next few weeks we followed up more calls than we would ever have believed possible from people who had seen cats in their gardens whom they were positive must be Seeley. We went to see every one. Nine times out of ten it transpired that the cat lived across the road, round the corner, or in some cases wasn’t a Siamese at all. We did, however, see six seal-point 133
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The Coming of Saska neuters in three weeks, all in the West of England, that were completely and hopelessly lost, obviously miles from their homes, with no clue as to how they had got there.
The thing that upset us every time, apart from the fact that it was never Seeley, was the fear and bewildered hopelessness that looked at us out of those lost blue eyes. Cats that had been so cherished, forced to fend for themselves. If we could, we’d have given a home to all of them, but we couldn’t take on six... and obviously somebody somewhere, like us, was grieving and searching for them. Their best chance of being found was to leave them where they were. In each case the person who had contacted us was quietly keeping an eye on them. The only thing we ourselves could do was to go on hoping and asking and searching.
Our worst experience was when a farmer’s wife rang us one night from five miles away, to say she’d seen a Siamese cat hunting round their barn at dusk for several evenings and she wondered whether we’d found ours yet. No we hadn’t we said. We’d come over at once... Oh, it wasn’t there now, she said. She was just checking to see if we’d found Seeley. She’d watch out, and if the cat appeared again, she’d ring us as soon as she saw it.
For two nights we heard nothing, so I rang her to enquire.