Lost Cat, Lost Heart
When a Pet Goes Missing, How Long Do You Look? How Much Do You Spend? How Many Straws Do You Grasp?

By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2007

There are a lot of missing-pet posters on the telephone poles of Takoma Park, but the one at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Sligo Creek Parkway stands out. Where the standard is "Seen Our Cat?" scrawled in runny magic marker, this one features sharp production values, a clean design and a laminated coating. Then there's the eye-catching reward: $1,000 for any information leading to the return of a black male cat named Mugoddai.

And finally, on a poster that was tacked up in April, there is this notable date: "Missing Since December of 2003."

Maxine Hillary refuses to give up on Mugoddai.

Three and a half years after her pet scampered off into a cold December night, after almost $4,000 in newspaper ads, pet detectives, animal communicators, infrared cameras, a laminating machine and bilingual mass mailings, after chasing down hundreds of tips and checking in each month with several local animal shelters, after a hundred miles of walks and a three-hour stakeout in front of a storm drain, Hillary is still not ready to consign her beloved pet to the cold-case file.

"My assumption is that somehow he's making it," Hillary said. "I just can't believe he's dead. It just doesn't make sense to me."

This is not a tale of a crazy cat lady. ("I may be a crazy cat lady one day, but I'm not one yet," she said.) It's the story of a successful career woman with many interests who, admittedly, takes her responsibility as a pet owner further than most.

A lot further.

"To me, this is not about having a cat; it's about finding the one cat that I nurtured and loved since before his eyes opened," said Hillary, who works on food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "I found myself walking around at 3 in the morning in the snow looking for him. Part of me said, 'This is crazy,' the other half said, 'Your pet is lost in a strange neighborhood.' He's my responsibility."

Hillary's love affair with Mugoddai began in 1997 on Guam, where she was working as a journalist and teacher. One day, an elderly neighbor asked her to investigate a mewling sound in his tin house. She found a sickly newborn kitten in a rainspout, abandoned by its mother.

"I said, 'Uncle, you have a cat,' " Hillary recalled. "He said, 'No, you do.' "

Hillary, who had no pets and didn't consider herself a particularly devoted animal person, nursed the kitten to health, giving him shots and pills and carrying him nearly constantly for a month.

"He needed so much care," she said. "I walked the floor with him like a baby."

She named him Mugoddai, a word in a Guam island language that translates roughly as the gaga feeling you get when you see a baby or a kitten, and they became inseparable.

Mugoddai stayed with her through several moves, from Guam to Arlington County and eventually to Takoma Park in 2003. On Dec. 11, after keeping him indoors for their first two weeks in a basement apartment near Sligo Creek, she took Mugoddai out for a test walk in the yard.

"He was right next to me," she said. "Some traffic went by and spooked him. He ran to the back yard. I haven't seen him since."

Hillary was devastated. She lost eight pounds in the first week. A two-day snowstorm moved in, but she wandered the neighborhood day and night. She slapped up a few posters but found the process frustrating.

"As much as we talk about spaying, neutering and vaccinating our pets, we need to talk about what to do when they go missing," said Hillary, who has become an advocate for pet identification programs. "My vet would push toothpaste for cats, but they didn't have a microchip machine."

Then she got methodical. With help from friends, she began knocking on doors and put more than 1,000 flyers in neighborhood mailboxes. She offered a reward, pinned cards on bulletin boards, posted notices to local e-mail group lists. She blanketed telephone poles as far as five miles from her apartment.

And she followed every tip. When a black cat was sighted near a storm drain a few blocks away, she parked her car and settled in for a long surveillance.

"I sat there in the snow with a cup of coffee for several hours until I saw the cat," Hillary said. "It wasn't Mugoddai."

She placed several newspaper ads, she said, that prompted the "con men and weirdos" to emerge.

The first was a pet detective (and part-time bounty hunter), who promised results.

"He came out with his truck and his dogs," Hillary said. "He charged me a thousand dollars, and told me my cat had gone over the fence in the back yard."

She paid another, Sherlock Bones, $250 for the same result.

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://www.mugoddai.com, sending out monthly flyers to the animal shelters, regularly scouring the found-cats list on PetHarbor.com and dropping the occasional bulk mailing of "Still Missing" postcards to 6,000 Takoma Park households.

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."