Coco is found

Coco is found

Coco is found. She is home again, where she belongs. I just thought I would tell you, in case any of you still were concerned.

The next-door neighbor to a friend of mine here on the island called me about a week after Coco went missing, after falling 4 stories out of our window. We had plastered Reimersholmen with posters of Coco, asking if anyone had seen her. The neighbor called to tell me that she was fairly certain that she had seen a cat answering Coco’s description up behind the building next to hers, on the highest part of our island of Reimersholmen, near the edge of the car park. We hadn’t been looking there, so Bevin and I went to investigate. Benigna, the neighbor, came out to meet us when we went up to look and she showed us exactly where she had seen the cat. We were so grateful for her concern. Just at the edge of the car park the ground drops, forming a kind of cliff. I wasn’t able to walk down that steep slope, my mountain goat days being long over, but my son could. He could see cave-like holes leading into the side of the cliff. Small holes, just the perfect size to fit a cat. We started taking turns going up there, leaving food near the biggest “cave”. I would go up during the day, bringing a book and sitting and waiting and calling her name, to see if she would appear. My son went up in the evenings after he got home from work and it was starting to get dark.

After several days of this, my son is up near the cave area and we are WhatsApp texting to each other – I am at Stavsnäs, our country house and he is in town. It is evening but still light enough to see and he finds a cat sitting in one of the caves and sends me a photo of it. We discuss whether this is the other cat that has gone missing here on Reimers. Suddenly he writes “She’s back” and then sends me a picture of our Coco as she calmly walks up over a moss-covered rock towards him! She goes over to him, rubs across his leg and looks up at him as if she is asking, “What are you doing here?” He gathers her up in his arms and brings her home. Her week and a half vacation out in the wild is over.