When the temperature went below freezing, there was icy rain. Still searching, I would sometimes see little cat tracks in the snow near dumpsters full of garbage, I also saw prints made by bobcats or coyotes. I caught three feral cats in my trap and let them go. I would go and sometimes glimpse a grizzled adult melting away into the woods, or behind a building or under a parked car.Īfter two weeks there were no more sightings. Every few days, someone would call and say they had seen a cat in a parking lot or behind their dorm. I put hundreds of flyers up, I walked around knocking on doors, asking people if I could look in their shed or under their porch. I spent hours at a time wandering around calling Gattino. There are wooded areas in all directions, and many homes with decrepit outbuildings sit heavily, darkly low behind trees, in thick foliage. Our new house is on the outskirts of a college campus near a wildlife preserve. Gattino disappeared two and a half months after we moved. Afraid but ready startled by a large male, that’s how he would’ve been. But I heard something besides the words, something in the coarse, vibrant tone of the man’s voice that immediately made another emotional picture of the cat: back arched, face afraid but excited, brimming and ready before he jumped and ran, tail defiant, tensile and crooked.

One guy, who said he saw my cat trying to scavenge from a garbage can, said that he’d ‘looked really thin, like the runt of the litter’.

For two weeks after he disappeared people claimed to have seen him I trusted two of the claims because Gattino was blind in one eye, and both people told me that when they’d caught him in their headlights, only one eye shone back. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent.

If cat disappear from the world book