Alazha in the mountains

My dad even wrote condolences about Ala (my dad never writes to me).

Christa & Yarrow,

I was very sad to hear that Alazha has gone.

In the short time that I had near her she seemed like a super cat to me with super human abilities. I remember when she used to travel between our house and your building site in the Magic Forest. I found that amazing. When you were in Europe we heard that she was missing but then you found her checked into a near-by hotel that had a cool marble floor. I could see her in her regal position saying " come on in".

Even in her final days she was a gracious soul.

He reminded me that when we were in Bulgaria (apartment living again, in Bansko, absolutely gorgeous historical mind-blowing town, but no outside time for the cats, so I took Ala up the mountain for exercise), Ala went AWOL at one point. It was a HOT summer and I asked the motel owners beside where we'd been picnicking if I could look inside for the cat but they weren't amenable (or they despised my terribly nonexistent Bulgarian maybe). So that night I went back and said, okay, well, I'm going to pitch my tent outside so that my cat will come to the tent overnight. So I was sleeping away in the tent and in the middle of the night or thereabouts, they come out to my tent and they're like "come on come on" and I think "uh oh, they're evicting me and my tent" but no, they wanted to show me Ala, who, indeed, had been inside. The floor of the motel was marble. She was about 16 years old at that point and certainly knew how to get cool. And there I had been trying to get her wilderness time. Hmmf!

As to the bit about my building site, that's when I was trying to build my tiny home, and Ala easily traversed the Rocky Mountain bush a half mile or mile at a time. One time we all were sitting on the deck at my parents' castle, and we heard a cat fight on the ridge. Lots of screaming. It must have been a bobcat or a lynx (or possibly even a cougar). Anyway, Ala's negotiation skills worked fine, clearly, because she came back without a scratch on her. Actually, Ala never did get any physical wounds from altercations. She was really good at screaming aggressors away if required. She really preferred conflict avoidance.