Smudge, our cat has now been missing for a week. It is Friday and the last time we saw her was last Friday evening. It was not unknown for her to disappear for a good 24 hours or so from time to time, but it would seem that this time she is not coming back.
We have searched everywhere for her, up the road, in the ditches, in the fields, in the gites (she has been shut in them before) and around to our neighbours, but to no avail. It is quite strange as you would expect her to be relatively safe here, compared to a town cat, as there's only one road near us and there's hardly ever any traffic, so it is unlikely that she has been run over. All we can think of is that maybe a fox got her, or maybe one of our neighbours put down poison for other annoying pests (rats, foxes etc) and she ate it.
It is difficult not having a 'body' that we could bury in the garden and say goodbye to, but the girls seem to be coping quite well. Isabella asked for another cat this morning, which in some way seemed a bit quick, but they have been raised to understand 'the ways of the countryside' as it were - ie animals die and it's all part of nature. We often have stray cats hanging around the place and we have to ignore them and let nature take its course, we couldn't possibly take them all in, we'd be overrun. Plus, Adrian shoots pigeon and rabbit, (and used to fish) so they are used to seeing animals being killed for food, they are not sheltered from that kind of thing. Not that we would eat the cat, but we've explained to them what we think might have happened and so far they seem to be accepting it.
It's a shame about Smudge, because she was barely 2 years old, she was one of the local strays, living under our hangar, and quite frankly, at death's door when we took her in. She was tiny and had not been properly weaned, looked like abandoned by her mother, and she fought so hard to survive and now she's gone already. She was a lovely little cat, very sociable and would follow us around the garden and up the road. I think she fed quite well from our guests in the summer too! She made us laugh recently - Adrian shot a pigeon out of the tree in front of the house and of course it fell out to the ground underneath. The cat was nearby and had witnessed this and rushed over to the pigeon before Adrian could get there. Luckily she did nothing to it, but she spent the next half hour sitting under the tree, looking up very expectantly, waiting for more dead birds to fall out!
RIP Smudge.
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