Losing Aimee

It had been 163 days since we last saw Lizzy and rarely a day passes when I don’t think of her. It certainly affected our relationship with first Aimee and then once we had her, Lexi. Aimee’s normally pretty punctual for her evening dinner and now if we don’t see her around 6pm we both kind of instantly spiral into panic. You only need one of us to utter the words, “Have you seen Aimee recently…?  And then we’ll drop everything, searching until we find her, trying to laugh off our slight panic. Despite this, we try not to let it affect her life too much. She’s the one that came back after all. After four years with us, she’s always returned, albeit on her own terms. We always try to pick spots that we think will be as safe (as much as is possible to judge anyway) for our girls as we know they love to go out for a run around and keeping them in all day and night isn’t fun for anyone. 

Despite the fact that we were camped next to a fairly busy road, we felt the cats would be ok. While noisy trucks passed not far away, they were slowed to a crawl by the dirt road and the sharp bend. Behind us, a more appealing path lay up the hill to the side of the waterfall which we hoped they’d prefer over the dusty and loud road. There weren't any nearby houses or dogs, in fact there wasn’t much except us and with the few scattered outbuildings. While the trucks rolled past for much of the day and a fair portion of the night, it was largely drowned out by the rushing water behind. 

The owners had said that one of them would come back in the night to block off the exit for the pool, which they seemed to empty daily but needed quite a few hours to refill for the next day. It was not the return of the owners that woke us however, but a loud cat fight happening above us on the solar panel. Somehow, as appears to be her talent, Aimee had attracted the local cat and was fighting it on the roof at 3am. Normally our skinny little bean is a bit of a badass, shoving off cats twice her size and for the most part completely unscathed. She doesn’t half make a noise, but it’s normally just that. Nevertheless, Lee leapt out of bed to see the retreating ginger tom cat running for the road. We weren’t overly concerned, this happens quite often. We often marvel at how in the middle of nowhere there will still be a random cat. We went back to bed. 

Now Aimee is not only normally pretty punctual for feeding time, but she’s always there in the morning. The reason for the last time we had cause to worry back in Piura was when she wasn’t there when we woke up. On that day she vanished nearly 12 hours, before swanning back into camp in the late hours of the afternoon and demanding dinner. This was pretty uncharacteristic behaviour, but she didn’t seem to care when we pointed it out. So the following morning when we only had Lexi, we thought back to Piura and tried not to worry. It was hot here after dropping 4000m the previous day and sometimes she likes to find a cool spot for the day. We wouldn’t worry we told each other, it was fine. We would have liked to leave as we didn’t really want to pay for another night and we had plans to go to a nice spot further on towards the Amazon, but we explained to the owner we were waiting for our cat and in the meantime we swam in the pools and enjoyed the sun. 

I made use of the clean water to do some laundry and we did our best to relax while Aimee nagged at our thoughts. Towards the end of the afternoon the few visitors started to leave, the position of the valley put this spot in shade early and while the water was a welcome relief from the sun, it was a bit on the fresh side without it. One of the workers came around and started to wash down the sides around the pools, including my very nicely cleaned and nearly dry floor mat. He gave it a good blast, spraying up the surrounding dirt all over it before moving on. I got the impression he thought he’d done me a favour, and for a second, my annoyance distracted me from the fact that it was fast approaching 6 o’clock. We told each other all day we wouldn’t worry unless it was dark and she hadn’t returned. Anything short of that could be classed as normal Aimee. Six o’clock came and went, with still no sign of her. Lee had already sunk himself into a bottle of spirits and had managed somehow to buy some cigarettes with our few remaining coins. There went months of working hard at quitting but I suppose we all have different ways of dealing with stress and at this point we were both definitely stressed. We had planned on leaving today and getting some cash, we didn’t have enough on us to pay for another night here but fortunately they hadn’t asked. 

We tried to walk around calling her but the trucks were relentless at this time of day meaning it was impossible to hear something subtle like a cat bell and probably impossible for her to hear us too. We walked up and down the road hoping nevertheless she’d hear us and follow us back. Lee decided to walk a huge route back down the road, turning off at a smaller route to access the valley below. A long walk for him but if she had decided to go down the valley it wasn’t far below. The steep gravelled sides meant it was impossible for us to walk the river bed but it would be easy enough for a cat. While he set off to do that, I stayed at the van. We had a new powerful torch that we had bought precisely to find the cats at night and I spent the next few hours charging it up and then walking up and down the road before returning to charge it again.  

After several hours, I saw Lee walking down the road illuminated in a cloud of dust by the truck headlights behind. He had at this point finished the bottle of spirit and wandered somewhat in the middle of the road toward me. I went to rescue him as trucks blared their horns and buried him further in an enormous dust cloud, he didn’t see the problem, flapping me away as I tried to make him walk on the side, shining a torch behind us so that the lorries would see us. He had reached the level of drunk where he repeated on loop everything that had happened in the last hour. He told me how he’d gone down and wandered around telling everyone he saw that his cat was missing. No one had seen her though. Our last hope was that she was waiting for the traffic to die down before returning. While it was only a few trucks, they were incredibly loud, definitely enough to scare off a cat. 

Back at Ruby, we decided to do shifts. Lee was happy to stay awake and had already started make a significant dent on the second bottle we had bought. More cigarettes had materialised and I left him gently swaying on the side of the pool with instructions to wake me up in a few hours. I doubted I’d sleep, I went to bed fully clothed ready to get up soon, but I could at least rest my eyes for a bit. I hadn’t been in bed long when I heard distant shouting. As it grew gradually closer and I realised it was Lee calling me. I leapt out of bed and went to meet him at the corner where our little spot re-joined the road. 

He was adamant he’d heard Aimee. He flapped urgently in the direction of the road.

“There!! By the white post” he told me. A line of white reflective posts bordered a couple of hundred metres stretch of road to warn drivers of the approaching bend and steep drop to the side.

“Which one?” I asked him urgently. “Where were you?”

“WHITE POST!” He shouted, angry at my stupidity.

“There’s lots of white posts babe. Which one??”

“POST…THERE… There’s more…than one. I… I didn’t see those” He tailed off. 

Despite this slight oversight, which probably had something to do with the second bottle of spirit nearing its end. We optimistically began to walk the line of posts, calling her. Then I heard it too. An unmistakable howl. She was here. Despite the fact it was nearing midnight, the odd truck still passed, drowning out all other noise and covering us in another cloud of dust. In between the trucks every now and again we heard the howl. After what seemed like an age we finally saw her. She was only a few metres below us on the cliff. Belly to the floor she crawled between the straggly plants, crying out. While she saw us, she was too scared to come up. She’d lost her collar too. It took me physically restraining Lee to stop him trying to scramble down to her. The shear loose scree slope with nothing to hold onto wasn’t something we could go down, despite the fact that he was adamant he could.

She was heading in the direction of Ruby, howling. Eventually with a lot of coaxing we managed to get her up the bank and sweep her up out of danger. I held her in a vice grip as we returned to the van, shut the doors and let her go again. She was not a happy kitty and clearly a bit traumatised but she didn’t seem physically harmed and we finally had her back. I do think she would have made it herself that night, she wasn’t far away and heading towards us but I’m glad that we had her. I think we’d both silently agreed that if we lost Aimee the trip was over. There was no way earth could we go through that again. Finally we fell into bed, dusty and exhausted but with enough of the night left to make sleeping worth it.