well it looks like Belladonna has gone feral again
She stayed home for several days, going out on short hunting trips. She left me a 2nd mole. And then we had some beautiful weather and she left again. That was nearly 2 weeks ago.
I'm not grieving they way I did before. She didn't seem the same when she came back. She didn't hang out on the rafters any more, didn't seem playful or come looking for me...just either slept or hunted. So the bond that I thought we had formed seemed gone. There is still a bowl of food on top of the haystack, just in case. But I'm not watching for her any more.
In the meantime, I've started Dahli back under saddle. That is not going well either. She does not want to be a riding horse. She started to try to buck the first time I tried trotting her. Today, she suddenly refused even to walk forward, threw her head up and smacked me in the jaw with it. When I took her back to the barn she was fighting with her groundwork gear -- really fighting with herself. Apparently she has decided to be a freeloader. 
= new reply since forum marked as read
She may just be a free spirit. After all, she is a cat! LOL
My guess is she is just delighted that Spring is here & out checking out the new developments. Spring is in the air!
Don't be surprised if she's not back in a few weeks. Cats are independent cusses who call their own shots. It's what I like best about them. Take heart, and celebrate her return! Perhaps she is trying to teach you something about your self. My cats have always been some of my best teachers! 
Dahli is teaching me lately, although I'm not sure what. She has stopped trying to buck me off and instead the last time I was on her, unexpectedly balked, threw her head up for no apparent (physical) reason... and smacked me in the jaw with her head. That was Tuesday morning.
On Wednesday morning at around 6 am, Luna woke me up by staring at me. In my sleep, I thought (correctly) that he wanted to get under the blankets next to me, so I lifted them up. As I raised my head slightly, he decided to shake out his ears and smacked me in the eye with his head. So I woke up screaming in pain.
I'm waiting for the 3rd smack in the face by a face, since I still haven't figured out the message of the 1st two. 
I celebrated Bella's last return, giving her many treats and ear scritches. She rewarded me with 2 dead moles and licking my fingers when I tickled her tummy. I will celebrate any return, but I'm not holding my breath waiting, or calling for her, or posting signs, or sending her mind pix. She is a free spirit, and that is fine. When she is here she is a perfect cat because she doesn't get under my feet and trip me while I'm doing chores. She makes no demands at all.
I'm a heavy believer in interpretation of events. Spirit often speaks to us w/direct actions that we must reflect on & find the meaning. Sometimes it is literal.
Are you going "head to head" with them?
Are they trying to "knock some sense into you"?
Are they trying to get you to "speak up/out" (jaw) or "see" about something?
Is there someone/something in your life that Belladonna wants you to learn to "let go" of?
Often it is something we haven't noticed that is right in our lives, but we are too absorbed to notice.
Only you can figure it out in your life. But I've found that animals are such good non-verbal communicators if we just take the time to pay attention to what they are "telling" us w/their actions.
Or maybe Dahli & Luna sense you're upset over Bella & saying "hey, we're still here! Don't forget about us!"
These are such wild & crazy times on planet Earth, I'm sure the critters are feeling it, too.
BTW, the moles are gifts. A good sign she loves you--her way of saying thank you.
I cleaned out Luna's ears yesterday. His are usually immaculate, but this time one had several chunks of goopy ear wax in it. He was telling me his ears itch in a way I couldn't miss, lol.
Dahli would never tell me outright, but I was still overfeeding her. Not in her opinion, of course, but in reality. I thought back to what we fed our 1st horse, some 50 years ago, and based on that and reviewing my one of my oldest backyard horse-keeping books written by a feed company, not to mention her behavior, concluded I needed to cut her further back. 4 days later, she has lost the hay belly and the attitude, but her ribs, backbone and hips remain covered with a good layer of fat. She is still a learning experience and apparently I am a slow learner.
It is very difficult in New England, and I think I've lived here too long. I remember when I first moved up here over 35 years ago, noticing how fat -- as in obese -- the horses are compared to the rest of the country. Now my eye has gotten used to it, plus I'm constantly walking a tightrope. On the one hand, I've watched numerous overfed arabians of low-energy type put down from metabolic founder caused by overfeeding. I've also read numerous horror stories up here of arabians totally losing it during training, put down with broken bones. A couple times I've heard of them trying to climb or jump out of round pens when they were exposed to something frightening -- the most recent I remember was a cow being walked by. Again, I suspect overfed, in those cases the high-energy types. So arabs in New England have a bad reputation due to the culture of overfeeding.
On the other hand, I know of numerous cases of people literally having horses stolen from them for supposed neglect. If people want your horse, they will turn you in to the state for any reason they can come up with. I've witnessed specific incidents where it was clearly theft. In one Mass case, a new state animal control officer trying to make her mark illegally took $250K worth of show horses while the owner/trainer was at her husband's funeral! Instead of taking them to the state facility, she illegally brought in a group of volunteers who trucked them to their private farms and hid them from the owner. She also illegally refused to allow the owner's own vet examine them. This was shortly before I moved to Maine. The woman was too shell-shocked from her husband's fight with and death from cancer to put up much of a fight. They claimed she was not feeding them, when in fact they were fine. It had all started with a new neighbor from the city who didn't want horses next door (so maybe he shouldn't have bought a rural property next to a farm, but this is Mass and everybody likes to throw their weight around.) Anyway, she had a new horse shipped in across country and it arrived underweight. Not uncommon from a cross-country trip and not a new owner's fault, as she had no control over the horse until he arrived at home. So next door neighbor filed a complaint complaining she was starving the horse, which brought out the state inspector. They saw all the other horses in fine condition, all conditions fine, horse just arrived, etc. But they also saw what she had, and apparently decided they wanted it, so started monitoring her. When her husband's condition spiraled down, she took the horses out of training and put them on straight hay -- normal process -- while caring for her husband. And they deliberately plotted and waited until her husband's funeral to strike. Vile, vile, vile.
So I live in fear of neighbors, veterinarians, horse dentists, etc. My current vet is fine, thank goodness. I don't trust either dentist now, so am walking a tightrope there. I'm going to check next year and see if the vet floats teeth...I meant to this year and totally forgot.
Twice people have tried to turn Algiers and Dahli loose by the side of the road, plus I think the vet that I fired for refusing to treat when he was sick Algiers had her eye on Dahli. She was involved in a case a few years ago where somebody had their eye on a friend's horse and she refused to treat his horses when a sickness ran through his barn, then testified against him at trial. Until Algiers got sick, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. No more.
although to horse people their fragrance is the best perfume in the world! 
Also some non-horse people (I remember a man I worked with talking about the wonderful, healthy smell of horse manure, versus cow, goat and chicken manure. 
)
I've been in the horse world long enough to know how rough it can be. Unfortunately, it attracts anti-social control-freaks, the overly competitive, and snobs. Not all horse people are like that, of course. The real horse people just love horses, love to ride and/or drive, love to be around them, and caretake them...and enjoy being around other horse people. But for the non-horse people, driven my ego and/or money, they are also a magnet.
The Romney's are a prime example. When they gambled on a horse with a hoof defect, Ann Romney and her trainer drugged the horse up to the top levels of competition. When he was too unsound and in too much pain to compete any more, they drugged him up with surgery-level analgesics and passed him off as competition sound at high price to an unsuspecting buyer. Fortunately she had blood saved from his pre-purchase exam, which proved the scam. She dropped the Romney's from her lawsuit and settled out of court with their trainer.
at every opportunity, with a link to one mainstream article that referenced it.
It was fortunate that the buyer was apparently a good rider who could feel the difference. She was another client of the same trainer, but apparently a "throwaway" client who the trainer probably enjoyed telling that it was her bad riding that made the horse "feel funny" as the drugs wore off and the unsoundness began to appear. She hired a vet with 38 years experience as the official USET veterinarian to review the blood sample. He testified that he'd never seen such a drug cocktail put into any horse -- 4 different surgery level sedative and sedative-analgesics at once. 2 of them are a standard combination for x-rays and other procedures that require the horse stand quietly (and were what my vet used on Algiers when she intubated him for colic). But the other 2 are not, and you never see 3, never mind 4, at once! They can impact the heart rate and respiration. That poor horse could have dropped dead from it.
I really, really wish they had been banned from the Olympic team, but I'll bet he monitored Raphaela closely. 99%ers would never have access to those drugs, and would have faced lifetime competition bans, except they weren't caught in competition.
One DUer who is a pro said she's seen parents take out 2nd mortgages on their homes to buy schoolmasters for their talented kids to get a chance to make their name on. This could just as easily have been that kind of person they were screwing over, who wouldn't know better and wouldn't have access to the right level of veterinarian to get to the bottom of it and testify with full credibility.
