Meet Catherine B. MacLaine
Author & Storyteller
Catherine MacLaine has visited or lived in multiple African countries including Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Burkina Faso, and Tanzania, in solo trips or with family. Her four decades of extensive travel also include Canda, the USA, the UK and Europe. Her lifetime of rescuing animals began in childhood and continued over the decades involving too many animals to count, both wild and domestic, healthy, or disabled. Among her earliest volunteer or paid jobs included animal shelters, stables, and dog grooming shops. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from the Corcoran School of the George Washington University of Washington DC. She has been employed as a Coding Quality Analyst and Medical Code and when she is not writing, she can often be found enjoying Beatles music while cleaning out far too many cat litterboxes. She is a member of the Staunton Writers Group and has published in the Welcome Home newsletter. Catherine presently lives in Virginia with her husband and their disabled rescue cats.
A Billion Blue Wildebeest
A Memoir
Adventure
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.
Heartwarming
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.
Courage
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?
Reader Feedback
Catherine's storytelling is magical!