Дорин Тови - The Coming Of Saska

Then it was July. A whole year had gone by since our trip to Alberta and we recalled it nostalgically day by day.

This time last year it had been Klondike Days. This time last year, we were at Wapiti. Then came the anniversary of the day we went on the wolf-howl the day that had been so wonderful. This year it was one of the most tragic we had ever known. It was the day we lost Seeley.

128

The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd128 128

13/06/2007 17:36:11

Thirteen

THE PREVIOUS DAY HAD been such a pleasant one. We had gone down to the moors in the afternoon, to buy peat for the garden. We took tea with us and had it in the car, looking out at the rhines and the flat water meadows and the hedges of pollarded willows that make this corner of Somerset so reminiscent of the Camargue. We watched the herons flying home, and a water-rat sitting up in a clump of reeds eating a seed-head, turning it in his paws as if it were corn-on-the-cob. We came home and I took the cats for a run...

then in for their supper and ours. We ate in armchairs so that we could see The Pallisers ... Shebalu turning her back on such mundane behaviour as usual, Seeley watching eagerly with us. He sat on Charles’s knee, that being his favourite viewing point, which gave him an unobscured view of the screen. I looked across at him once. He was looking at me.

He squeezed his eyes affectionately, which was always his way of communicating. Later, I remember, he was rolling 129

The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd129 129

13/06/2007 17:36:11

The Coming of Saska happily on the carpet and I got down and hugged him, always a pushover for that little black pansy face. Really, I said, when we went to bed... I’d really enjoyed that day.

We let them out next morning, which was Sunday, and they ambled as usual up to the vegetable garden to eat grass and see what the day was like. Charles went with them, to check there were no cars about, and to open the greenhouse door and water the tomatoes. While I was setting breakfast I looked out through the kitchen and Seeley had come back and was sitting in the outer doorway. He was looking out into the yard, obviously wondering where to go next.

I almost fetched him in – but he hadn’t been out long, I thought. It was such a nice morning. Another ten minutes or so wouldn’t hurt. So I left him. Shebalu came back while we were having breakfast. But we never saw Seeley again.

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

The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd130 130

13/06/2007 17:36:12

Doreen Tovey

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

The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd131 131

13/06/2007 17:36:12

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

The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd132 132

13/06/2007 17:36:12

Doreen Tovey

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.