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Lost Cat, Lost Heart
(Courtesy Maxine Hillary)
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Then came the pet psychics, the pet communicators, the cat whisperers.
"I don't believe in any of that," Hillary said.
She paused.
"Well, I did try one or two of the communicators," she said. Nothing.
She even turned to dowsing, the traditional art of finding water. One of Hillary's growing number of advisers told her that dowsers, who don't always use divining rods, could also trace lost animals. She contacted the American Society of Dowsers, and the group did some long-distance cat dowsing.
The report came back that "Mugoddai is more than one and less than 2 miles from your house."
Hillary used that finding to leaflet a new area.
She also turned to more reliable science, buying an infrared camera and motion detector switches. She hooked it up to a VCR and taped everything that visited her yard each night.
"I'd sit down in the morning with a cup of coffee and fast-forward through it," she said. "I saw cats, but never my cat."
After 42 months, Hillary's search has matured into what she calls the "maintenance phase," which includes keeping up her Web site, http:/
She keeps a Mugoddai entreaty on her answering machine message. She replaces the telephone pole posters whenever they become faded or, as often happens, someone rips them down. After more than 1,200 days of this, Hillary said she is careful to avoid Mugoddai fatigue.
"I've tried not to exhaust the neighborhood, but I want people to know I'm still looking," she said. "I think I could go too far for some people."
And to the tentative suggestion that Mugoddai's most likely fate was that same road traffic that spooked him on that winter night, Hillary quickly replied: "Where's the body?"
"Many people know I'm looking for this cat," she said. "If he had been hit by a car, we'd have found him. All the vets I've talked to say if you haven't found a body, you can pretty much assume he's alive."
And as long as there's any chance Mugoddai might be out there, living a feral existence along Sligo Creek, maybe, or a more comfortable foster life in some distant back yard, Hillary will be looking.
"Will I still be at it 10 years from now? Of course not," she said. "Will I still be looking a year from now?"
She pauses again.
"I just really, really would like to see him again. That would be ecstasy."
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