The Story of Our Cat Who Went Missing on the Shores of Lake Superior

We had been standing on the beach in despair when we saw a little grey Toyota SUV pull into our driveway.

“She found the cat!” It could have been true because no one ever comes up our driveway unless we’re expecting them. But it wasn’t true because her windows were rolled all the way down.

I met her as she was getting out of her car. She was the woman who lived with her husband in the very old beach house more than a quarter mile down the beach. She had news.

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When we came back from lunch at the bar in town, the back door was wide open.

“Didn’t we close that door?”

And it was soon clear that Herc had left the premises. Our dogs, left behind at a kennel in Milwaukee, weren’t a worry. They were safe. I knew that from their air tags. An air tag is a device that tracks a thing or an animal. It connects to a person’s phone using a signal, so in a perfect situation, the air tag would show on a map where the lost thing or animal is.

But the air tag for Herc said he couldn’t be detected.

****

My husband searched around the house while my friend and I walked down the road. Somehow, in my thinking, I thought Herc would go down the driveway and then turn left to go to the end of the Point. We met up with my husband at a woman’s house three doors down, a ways in Lake Superior measure, who said she’d seen him earlier under her porch after her dogs caused a ruckus. But when she went back later to see if he was still there, he was gone. She felt terrible.

The lady a couple more doors down said her dog barked and her chickens squawked so maybe the cat had been there. She looked under her porch and we talked a long time about the cat, but he wasn’t there.

The older couple next to her in the old time Superior beach house stood timidly in the doorway to hear our story. “We’ll keep an eye out,” she said, while I looked under her porch.

The man in the house closer to our house came to the door very slowly like he had been having a lovely afternoon nap. He was wearing long pants and a white button shirt, but he was barefoot. “We’ve lost our cat,” I said. And then he said, “Well, then we must find him.” And he put on his shoes and walked around his house with his hands clasped behind his back like the retired professor he is.

****

I went home for water and to go to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet I tried the air tag again. Detected! I called for my friend who was resting, and we headed back down the road. Meanwhile my husband went to the store to buy smelly cat food for enticement purposes. When he was at the store, the cashier said that she’d heard we’d lost a cat. “He’ll come back. Don’t worry.”

The air tag said he was at 21916. We headed back down the beach. Between the 3rd or 4th house, I started to see Herc’s little pawprints in the sand. There were bird tracks there, too, and now and then dog tracks. The tiny prints wandered up and down dunes and then disappeared.

We searched all around 21926 but no Herc. “The air tag has to be wrong,” I said. My husband and I stood on the sand near our house. “What if we can’t find him?” We loved our cat, our son’s former cat that became ours after staying a very long time, and who slept curled at the bottom of our beds and walked on our heads to wake us up. There was no answer for that question.

The air tag still said 21916 but I decided it was stuck. Wrong. Our cat was lost. “There’s a fox who lives out here,” said the lady with the chickens. Now it was almost dinner time. Soon it would be dark. Herc and a fox were somewhere on the beach.

****

“Your cat looked in the window! We invited him inside and he came but then he ran away when he realized we weren’t you. I think he’s under our porch.”

And he was.

The delight of the lost and the found and the finders filled the entire beach, the entire lake, and the sky over everything. It was that wonderful.