BANDON - Down roads that wind through the gnarled hills of Northern California, likely into the darkness of the Whiskeytown Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, later through the online world - and against all odds - Edna Cramer's cat made it back to its owner in Bandon.

The 14-year-old feline, Ditto, never much cared for cars. Last summer, when Cramer decided to undertake a 900-mile move from Southern California to a balmy seaside neighborhood in Bandon, the cat had a mood swing, a momentary lapse of reason. She panicked. She ran for the hills.

"She stuck her little paw into a crack in the door," Cramer said. "Then she went down some steps out into the night."

Cramer was almost at the end of her journey when she stopped in Redding, Calif. She stayed there four nights longer than planned, putting up signs and canvassing the area's bushes after Ditto disappeared. Even with help from motel staff who upturned mattresses in every room and the next-door dental office workers who set a trap, the cat was nowhere to be found.

Before the 88-year-old left Redding, she put an ad in the Record Searchlight, a newspaper in the foothill city. She moved on to settle into her new life in Bandon and the e-mails started arriving. Four found cats became Ditto candidates and the concerned Californians sent photographs through the Internet.

There still was one problem. Ditto is a Siamese, a breed in which individuals all look alike. In fact, Ditto was called by that name because she looked just like Cramer's now-dead cat, Q.T. (Cutie), the freeze-dried corpse of which still adorns a glass case in her living room.

Needless to say, more than a photo was needed to identify the possible Dittos that wandered to homes in search of food and shelter.

While Cramer collected the evidence, a cat that didn't really fit Ditto's description arrived in November at a doorstep 19 miles north of Redding. It was dangerously skinny, sick and missing most of its fur. Leslee Zastrow thought twice before taking in the haggard cat because she suspected it was just another stray and wouldn't play well with her other four cats, dog and 14 birds. The cat never was accepted by the other pets, but Zastrow took care of it anyway.

"This cat looked like death warmed over," Zastrow said, adding she thought for sure it was one of the many feral cats she had fed in the past so she kept it from coming inside.

"But this cat didn't even look like a cat. She was a cat head on a body of something that kind of looked like a stick," she said. "I took her to the vet and kept asking her to check it over if she had any broken bones or anything emanating from her."

Gradually the ailing feline found its way into her home. That's when Zastrow began to realize the slowly recovering animal had probably been a pet at one time.

In the cat's month-long stay in this relatively isolated animal haven in the woods, Zastrow chopped all of its food with a processor since it couldn't use its teeth. On account of that and a bad case of dysentery, it made a mess.

"Cat food is nasty as it is," she said.

That's when the caretaker went in search of something to keep the house clean.

"I had to get some newspaper because it was just a disaster," Zastrow said.

And that's when she saw it - Cramer's ad laid out on the floor. Zastrow figured she'd make the call to Bandon, but didn't hold out much hope the picture was Ditto. Phone tag ensued.

"I told her, 'Let's face it; this isn't your cat,'" she said. "If she hadn't been so persistent, I don't think I would have returned the calls."

Cramer quickly arranged a trip south in mid-December with her son, Ron. They had four sightings to investigate and two people willing to give away Siamese cats. They arrived in the evening and checked into the same motel where Ditto had gone missing.

Before the mother and son arrived, Zastrow still was pessimistic.

"I was saying, 'Please, please, just be a Ditto for this lady tonight,'" she said.

As it turned out, the cat didn't need that much encouragement when Cramer walked inside.

"I thought, 'My God, this is a little old lady,' and then she told me she had owned the (lost) cat for 14 years. Ditto peeked around the corner and the lady's eyes lit up and all of a sudden, the air flickered," Zastrow said. "The cat went over to that lady's lap and just sat there, and she said, 'It's Ditto.'"

As the saying goes, all's well that ends well.

"It was a wonderful Christmas present," Cramer said at her Bandon home last week as the gangly cat purred from her lap. "I didn't give up, over and over, putting in those ads and going down there. We had a lot of people praying for us."

Ditto is now quickly recovering. Most of its fur has regrown and its teeth are functional again.

As for Ditto's heroine, she would not accept the cash reward or even the credit for finding the cat.

"Well, actually, the cat found me," Zastrow said.