From wild Africa to one fragile cat—love finds its fiercest form.
A joyous bucket list trip ends with a horrific surprise.
In 2017 Catherine, a Canadian native in her fifties, returned to Tanzania, East Africa, yearning to see her childhood home town once again. Over forty years before, in the early 1970s, as a little girl, she had encounters with feisty mongooses, charging elephants, innumerable wildebeests, and a lion with a (deserved?) reputation as a man-eater. Death intrudes occasionally in this otherwise heartwarming and charming memoir. One particular death, the inspiration for this book, is the most poignant of all.
Woven in with her childhood stories are Catherine’s adulthood adventures from her 2017 return trip, which ended with one unforeseen shock. She adopted an African street stray cat, Stanley, only to find out that the poor animal had a very severe neurological impairment. Nevertheless, she carried through with the adoption and brought the disabled cat home to live with her in America.
Catherine then embarked on a quest to learn exactly what his diagnosis was. Was it incurable? Why did Stanley remind her so much of the ‘man eater’ lion she’d known from her childhood? Would there be any hope for this vulnerable little tabby cat or would she end up having to euthanize him after all?
