Bella was so pleased with herself.

Last night I called my mother to give her an update on progress.

"How are you?" I asked.

"Not good." Was her reply. William had been missing since Sunday night.

William is not a cat who has ever shown any tendency to run away much before. He's a hider. I thought I had lost him as a kitten - certain he'd run away - to eventually find him rolled into a tight little ball on a shelf in my wardrobe. When I finally found him, and tearfully reached out to him - he hissed at me with all the venom his little milk-teeth could muster.

His tactic with dogs, vacuum-cleaners, the ironing-board, visitors, amplifiers and all other scary things has always been to dive for under the bed and stay there until either the coast is clear or he has been forcibly evicted.

So I was pretty certain that he wouldn't be lost, but that he would have been hiding, and watching everyone call for him like the big ol' scaredy-cat he is.

I arrived in Hamilton at about 10pm. We had a cup of coffee, armed ourselves with torches and headed out for the bushes. Mum and Oliver had already scoured the neighbourhood every night and morning for 3 days, so they weren't hopeful. Mum had knocked on all the neighbour's doors and distributed fliers and nobody had seen him. One neighbour had said that he had seen William chasing off a big burmese, and then run off himself - on Sunday.

It took all of 5 minutes, really. As soon as he heard my voice calling for him he came yowling behind me, with Bella in hot pursuit. Bella, my Grandmother's cat, considers herself the rightful owner of the Hamilton house. Bella was NOT HAPPY about William having emerged again, when she had been working so hard these last 3 days to keep him OUT of her house.

She saw us coming and started dancing on the street - as if to say - "Look, I chased that horrible other cat away. Aren't I good?"

I scooped William up and carried him the 3 doors down the street back to the house. Jess, the dreaded Doggie gave us a bit of a rush at the gate, and William in his panic scraped my decolletage (to put it politely) to pieces.

Once he was back inside Bingle was perfectly happy again. And hungry. Smoke is of course delighted to have his playmate back.