Desolate & Downhearted

I’m glad that I snapped several good photos of Bingo recently, because it is very doubtful at present whether I will have another opportunity to capture his beauty again on camera.

Bingo has been missing since the early morning of Wednesday 18 August, and despite all our efforts to find him, he remains lost to us.

We are heartbroken and torn between hope and despair –hoping to see him walk through the door, and trying to accept that he’s gone for good.

Tuesday night all was normal, Bingo sleeping on the bed with us as was his wont. He got up at around 2.30 am and we knew something wasn't right when he failed to to turn up for his breakfast. He always started hassling B at 6.30 am to get up and feed him. We were not overly alarmed at this stage as he occasionally became obsessed with something that caught his fancy in his cat world and would be home soon after.

We searched everywhere on Wednesday, multiple times over the day and in the evening. Calling his name and rattling a container of dried cat food would normally catch his attention and cause him to emerge from where he was lurking or communicate vocally, which to a Siamese cat is second nature. However, not a peep did we hear in all our perambulations through the streets of Ivanhoe.

So we are left wondering what disaster befell Bingo between the hours of 2.30 am to 6.30 am on that Wednesday morning.

Was he stolen?

With Melbourne currently being in hard lock down, very few people would have been abroad  so early in the day with dawn currently occurring around 6.30 am, so it is unlikely that he was catnapped. Besides, Bingo was very shy of strangers, even if they were visitors to the house, so he would have been hard to catch and would not willingly have entered a cage.

That he was trapped in a garage or shed seemed the most likely explanation of his non appearance, but the Lost Cat posters placed in all the nearby streets have failed to register a response from neighbours.

He’s registered as missing in all the usual places – vets, council, cat protection society and several Lost Cat Facebook pages. We’ve done everything we can to locate him, but as the  days roll by we’re losing hope of ever finding him alive or ascertaining his whereabouts and state of health.

Bingo was (hopefully is) a remarkable cat, and it’s only now that he’s gone that I realise what a big part of our lives he was. Every room in the house brings some reminder or expectation of seeing him – the cat toy abandoned in the hallway, the paw prints on the kitchen bench, the habit of closing doors in the house to reduce the places where he can drag his prey to kill,  or get up to mischief.

He took an interest in everything we did and loved his home comforts of food and warmth and laps to sit on.

I am certain that if he could have got home, he would have come home. He knew where he lived, no matter how far he roamed.

He was our sunshine. Without him, the world is a sadder place.