Elle

So, I haven’t announced this to the greater internet yet, because it’s one of the worst things that I’ve ever had to go through, but… well, we lost Zapp.

2 months ago. It was stupid, too: he burrowed a tiny hole out of the back of his catio and escaped into the wilderness behind our home.

We’ve gone to elaborate, fanciful lengths to try and track him down - hunting dogs, signs, long walks, thermal imaging. He might well still be out there, but there haven’t been any credible sightings.

The complex array of trail cameras and food traps I’ve set up out there have clued me in to the day-to-day patterns of some 5 local cats, some skunks, some raccoons, and some coyotes (and one less raccoon, thanks to the coyotes).

Over the past six years I’ve taken a little bit of time out of my day every day to make this little guy feel special and loved.

He was brave and outgoing, playful and clever, and he put up with our human snuggles pretty well even though he constantly gave off a vibe I would describe as “you dare to snuggle me, the mightiest hunter in the jungle? I will accept it, but only because you are very warm.”

But a good thing to come out of this was that while we were checking local shelters to see if maybe someone had encountered a spirited little bengal, we found that…

Well, someone had! Not ours, not Zapp, but this bengal girl about his age had been rescued from an abusive and neglectful home situation and needed a home - preferably with someone experienced with bengals, because they’re a difficult breed.

When we first met her, she was apprehensive and nervous. Also: bouncing around between food scarcity and food abundance has turned her into a bit of a chonker.

So she came home with us. The SPCA is no place for such royalty.

She feels like the diametric opposite of Zapp: where he was scrappy, brave, curious, self-possessed, and motivated by play,

Elle is skittish, terrified of her shadow, unwilling to try new things unless they’re very carefully vetted, but once she feels comfortable: chatty and cuddly. She’s been attention-starved for much too long and now she thrives when the humans are nice to her.

I sat patiently with her for days after we brought her home and she’s decided that she sleeps with me, now. She’s been coming out of her shell more and more, chirping delightedly at me when I wake up, exploring further and further out of her Bedroom of Safety, and playing with increasingly reckless abandon.

She needed a kind human to help her heal from the trauma of Bad Humans. (And get her back into shape, bengals are not supposed to be this beefy.)

I needed a little creature to defend to help me heal from losing the Crown Prince of All Cats.

We’ve made fast friends.

I put all of my Zapp pictures together. 13 gigabytes. It may be one of the most thoroughly documented cat-lives ever to occur.

Elle being completely different is actually pretty helpful: Zapp hasn’t been replaced (impossible), he just taught me how to be in love with cats so that I could pass that along to this sweet girl who needed a home.

I doubt we’re going to see the kind of madcap bravura out of Elle we saw out of Zapp, but we’ll see.