Cat as Map of the World
Sojah’s love was so true, so accurate that she risked her life to find me at the last possible minute before I abandoned her forever.
INTRODUCTION: A few days, I saw a headline that grabbed my eyes and my memory, “Cat Lost in Yellowstone Is Back Home After Traveling 900 Miles in 2 Months.” Rayne Beau the cat showed his strength and determination after traveling about 900 miles through at least four states to reunite with his family.
I suddenly remembered the story of Sojah, my childhood companion. She also completed an Incredible Journey, and I want to tell you about her, and along the way, a little bit about me growing up.
Sojah’s body was a map of the known world. In the calico complications of her fur I could trace the oxbows of the Wenatchee River. The sungold sandstone cliffs of Sunnyslope broke in vertical stripes down her delicate shoulders. Dark orchards crowded the crosshatched line of her spine. Our riverbend house was blocked in white fur under her chin; each patterned leg flashed the four directions. Behind one ear, the rhubarb patch; behind the other, the mulberry tree. The distance from rump to high-held tail was the long rise of Horse Lake Road. Sojah belonged to the place, and she carried its many-colored meanings wherever she went.
From the beginning, Sojah showed me her world. One day, she soft-footed up the stairs to my room, leapt onto my study desk, and stared at me. Then she leapt down, and I knew to follow her out of doors. We passed under the jeweled curtain of the willows and stopped above the culvert where Horse Lake Creek flowed under our yard.
Sojah sat on the brink, front paws together, and looked down. I lay on my belly peering over the edge. I saw a small rattlesnake, tongue listening. I threw a rock at him. The splash startled him into the water. He swam downstream as I ran alongside. I got around the rhubarb and under the mulberry tree only in time to see him slip into the railroad culvert: next stop, the Wenatchee River.
I looked round for Sojah. She had a mouse-sized kitten in her teeth and was briskly moving her litter out of her nesting site by the creek upstairs into my closet. Kittens were always Sojah’s first priority, but she had the patience to be dressed in doll clothes. I pushed her around in my baby buggy, spotted face peering out of a ruffled bonnet. Kittens could ride, too. When I graduated from dolls to horses, Sojah became a trick rider. She took up the confident stance of a leopardess on Lance’s rump and would trot with me around the pasture as I practiced pretend-shooting under his neck. If Lance and I left the safety of the corral, she jumped off and returned to mama duty; the places we rode were not on her map.
Our growing family added another rambunctious member when Sooner the German shorthair dog came to live with us. My dad thought Sooner was the smartest hunting dog in Eastern Washington, but I secretly disliked him. If I got too close, he leapt up and gouged me with his sharp nails. He was chained to the mulberry tree in the pasture, and the beaten circle of dirt always stank of dog poo.
Sojah found a new birthing nest for each batch of kittens, indoors or out. One autumn, she nested in the twisty root ball of one of the weeping willows.
The guys had just returned from a chukar-hunting trip. My dad opened the back hatch of our International Travel-All, and Sooner came flying out, long ears flapping. He ran to the nearest willow to relieve himself, then ran to the other tree.
Sojah fended him off with a screeching yowl and an all-claws slap to the nose, but Sooner was oblivious. He flipped the kittens in the air the way a coyote will flip mice out of a burrow. Sojah attacked, screaming, back arched, teeth bared, claws flying.
The screen door banged behind Mom as she charged out of the kitchen yelling, “Sooner, you get out of there!”
Daddy called, “Sooner! You come here, boy!” He ran with a chain to collar the big dog, but the damage had been done. Two of the kittens were dead; three of them injured beyond rescue.
Mom sewed some scraps of white fabric into five white shrouds. She placed a body in each one. My job was to throw them in the river. Daddy said I should hit the live ones with a rock and put them out of their misery, but I thought they would drown quickly enough in the water.
I thought drowning kittens would be easy. The day was crunchy and sweet as a fall apple. The river rapids shook foam into the air the way a Golden Delicious will spurt when you bite into it.
One by one I hurled the white packages into the river. I expected the kittens to sink, but they bobbed on the surface as the current swept them toward the Columbia River. My dad had been right about killing them first. I had thought to distance myself from their death by letting the river do the job I didn’t have the stomach for. Back home, Sojah yowled soft and low while twining about my legs. I picked her up and buried my nose in her fur. There was nothing I could say to comfort either of us.
When I went away to college, the animals I loved seem to recede into the land of memory, but in fact, they were still living their lives in Wenatchee. When the last child graduated from high school, my parents sold the property and moved first to Richmond Beach in the north Seattle area, then a year later to Arizona. Lance the red horse went to live in the Skagit Valley. An uncle adopted Sooner the dog. Sojah the calico cat moved with the parents to the Richmond Beach house.
The family of my childhood was breaking up, but we entered a new leg of our journey through time together when we all joined a spiritual group called Emissaries of Divine Light. It was decided that over Spring Break—okay, it was 1972, if you must know-- nine of us would caravan to 100 Mile House, British Columbia, for a one-week seminar at the Emissary Canadian headquarters. This trip coincided with my parents’ move from Richmond Beach to Arizona.
Sojah had made it safely to the beach house, but she disappeared when the packing began again. The chaos factor trebled with the three home siblings packing not only for British Columbia, but to go our ways when and if we returned. Sojah went missing.
I looked and looked. I see a snapshot of myself sitting on the Richmond Beach cement breakwater, despairing into the sunset of a world so complex that a small, scared cat could be a million impossible, undiscoverable places. I couldn’t find her. At the same time I was finishing my senior finals at the University of Washington. But I was also gripped by the spiritual fervor of becoming an Emissary. I’m not sure I looked hard enough for the lost Sojah. Not knowing where to look next immobilized me on the pier into doing nothing rather than that something more.
Sojah did not appear. My parents’ van pulled away from the empty house and hauled away south on I-5. I crammed my red Ford Falcon to the high jams with my few worldly goods and camped out at my sister’s house in Auburn, a Seattle suburb sixty miles south of Richmond Beach. I would be there for a few days while the caravan assembled for take-off.
Finally organized, we got in our cars and turned on our engines. As I backed out of the driveway, I saw a cat in my side mirror limping down the tree-lined street from the north. It was Sojah. With split-second timing, she had completed an Incredible Journey of at very least sixty miles.
Seattle is split by the Duwamish River and the Lake Washington Ship Canal. There are four lakes, seven hills and deep ravines all within the city limits. This cat crossed The Highlands, Crown Hill, Ballard, Queen Anne Hill and made her way through the port confusion of Pike Street Market, the industrial wastelands of Harbor Island and Georgetown, the suburban jungles of White Center, Mountain View, Evansville and Burien. She found us in a town and an address she had never been to before at the last possible moment of rejoining her family.
Even now I don’t know well enough how to respect the love that drove her to make that distance. But somehow I or we were responsible, as if we had homing coordinates implanted in us, and she had a GPS unit in her brain. She had followed some invisible roadmap of feeling across a strange urban wilderness to find us.
I stopped the car and ran to gather her up, a fifteen-year-old cat now made ancient by distance and ordeal. Her long fur with its distinctive markings was disheveled. She cried out in welcome, relief and pain in my arms. With fingers not gentle enough, I found her broken ribs. We settled her in a box under the dashboard heater by my sister Toren’s feet and smuggled her across the U.S./Canadian border.
And here’s the thing: I was so caught up in the high of joining this great spiritual family of “conscious, evolved beings” that I didn’t even have the conscious, evolved thought to take Sojah to the vet. When we arrived at 100 Mile House, we settled Sojah’s box in the middle of the half-finished room Toren and I had been assigned.
Word was sent of the hurt cat, and a white-haired Englishman who introduced himself as Roger de Winton appeared. He squatted in front of Sojah and held his hand over her in a gesture of healing. Eyes closed, she panted quickly, pink-and-black spotted tongue stuck out between white whiskers. She huddled in the box on the cement floor, the map of our old world matted, blurred, and bloodied. Where once the finger-scratched path of the river wound down among the shadows and lights of her spine, the way was lost. The fall of white from chin to chest that was the road through my childhood was smeared into the muddy geography of a city she now knew more intimately than any Seattle ally cat.
A younger man thumped up the sheet of plywood into the construction zone and said his name was Peter Castonguay. Eager to help the healing master, he squatted and held his hand six inches over Roger’s. Sojah cried out and died.
Peter felt bad that he had seemed to cause Sojah’s death. “Come with me to the barn,” he said, “We’ll bury her out back, and then I want to show you something.”
The map of Sojah’s world ended in a Canadian pasture. When the mini-ceremony was over, Peter shouldered the shovel and led us into the filtered light of the big old barn. “Up here,” he said, “follow me.”
We followed him up a ladder into the hayloft. Peter reached his big paw down into the hay next to a mama cat and pulled out a five-week-old kitten. She was almost a replica of Sojah with her long hair and calico markings. Toren lifted her face up so their blue eyes met. “Look!” she said, “her nose is half black and half gold, exactly like Sojah’s. What are the chances of that?”
“She’s yours when you leave next week. She’ll be six weeks old, plenty old enough to be weaned.”
Toren rubbed behind the kitten’s ears and made her purr. “Barn,” Toren said. “Her name is Barn.” And so Barn became Toren’s cat and went to live with her in Arizona.
As for me, it was many decades before I earned the right to share a home with another cat. In my excitement to grow up, move away, become a more spiritually enlightened person, I neglected a loved one in my care. Yet Sojah’s love was so true, so accurate that she risked her life to find me at the last possible minute before I abandoned her forever. Sojah’s commitment to our lifelong love shamed me, for I had not been so true. Her Incredible Journey made me smaller, less full of myself, and yet more human, after all.
Real-life cat journeys
Some real-life cats have completed incredible journeys, including:
A cat that left California and appeared in Oklahoma 14 months later
A cat that traveled 2,300 miles from New York to California over five months to be with its owner
A French cat that traveled 75 miles through the Vosges mountains to find its owner who had left for military service
Learn more about Incredible Journeys by Incredible Cats here.
Do you have an Incredible Cat story? Tell us about it in the Comments.
Sojah was an amazing, one-of-a-kind kind cat. She delivered several batches of her kittens on the foot of my bed after Sandy went to college. That experience may have contributed to my becoming a labor and delivery nurse! But in regard to not considering taking her to the vet, that was just not part of our reality! Additionally, we didn't have 2 nickles to rub together so vetinary services would have been out of the question! Sojah made lifelong cat lovers and owners out of all 4 of us Brown kids!