Bev Hamilton doesn’t know where Miss Lillian Garfield, her much loved, fat, pampered puss, spent the 40 days after the Winmalee fires, all she knows is that she made it back.
“There’s still hope, that’s what I want to tell others,” she told the Gazette on Monday shortly after finding her slimmer moggy.
The former Heather Glen Road resident said she had five cats and two dogs in her home when the fires started on October 17.
One window was slightly ajar but she always believed they died in the firestorm.
During a quiet moment of reflection in the charred bush backyard of her Yellow Rock home on Monday morning she couldn’t believe it when she heard a cat miaowing.
“There’s only a letterbox and garbage bin left but I go there most days. Lily came out of the bush, up over the cliff. I just couldn’t believe it. I had given up hope. I just cuddled her.”
Mrs Hamilton said this particular moggy was given the Garfield moniker because she was so pampered.
Out of all her pets, she thought the tortoiseshell the least likely to survive in difficult circumstances.
“She’s usually in a bed upstairs asleep ... she’s the last one I thought would make it and now I think the others ... I’m going to be out there every dawn and dusk now and leave water and food,” Mrs Hamilton said.
When the Gazette visited to photograph the pair, she started calling for her other missing pets — Prim, a white cat with tabby patches, Max, the long haired ginger cat, Alby and Lou, her black cats; as well as Rex, a border collie, and Tigger, a staffy cross.
“I think Lily must have hidden in the caves —maybe she passed out in the smoke.”
She’s hopeful the other animals might have survived in the caves on her 16 acre bush block or that someone has found them.
Mrs Hamilton said her cat is in good condition despite the weight loss — “she’s about half her size” — but still appears to be in shock and a little “skittish”.
When she returned to her temporary home with her son in Faulconbridge her cat “immediately ran up the chimney — somewhere cold and dark.”
But she’s confident plenty of spoiling and bowls of milk will have her six-year-old puss back to normal soon.
“She’s got her mum back now.”
