7 Years After Disappearing In Maine, Cat Heading Home After Being Found In Central FL

LONGWOOD, FL — When Ashes the cat disappeared from her home in Chesterville, Maine, in August 2015, her family was devastated.

While they had other, older cats that liked to spend time both indoors and outdoors, they didn’t allow Ashes out of the house, Denise Cilley said. At least not yet.

She was maybe about 8 weeks old when she was adopted from the Franklin County Animal Shelter in October 2014 and only about a year old at the time she went missing, so they didn’t want to let her join her cat siblings outside until she was bigger and older.

“She was so little,” Cilley said.

Then, the unthinkable happened: Ashes somehow got out anyway, likely sneaking out with the other cats, and never came back.

Cilley and her family searched the neighborhood, calling the cat’s name, driving around and checking with neighbors, but there was no sign of Ashes.

To make matters worse, Ashes disappeared on her daughter, Katie’s, 10th birthday. It was also the second year in a row they lost a cat on her birthday, though that cat was a different situation, Cilley said. “We had a feral cat that we domesticated, and I think he decided to be feral again.”

Their home is surrounded by wilderness in the Western Foothills mountains, and they feared the worst, especially after they saw a fisher and a fox on their game camera. So, they gave up looking for Ashes.

“We thought a predator got her,” Cilley said.

Then, nearly seven years later, on Jan. 22, she got an unexpected call from Longwood, Florida.

“We have your cat,” a vet told her.

“I live in Maine. We don’t have a cat in Florida,” she said, thinking it was a wrong number.

The vet told her that when they scanned the cat, they found a microchip from the Franklin County Animal Shelter that was registered to Cilley. When she confirmed the cat was a spayed, female gray tabby, she knew it was Ashes.

From there, she needed to figure out how to get her long-lost cat home. The distance between Longwood and Chesterville is more than 1,400 miles, according to Google Maps.

Through a mutual friend, Cilley connected with a longtime animal rescue and welfare advocate in Florida who also happened to be a former Maine resident.

Janet Williams moved to Orlando, where she founded the Pixel Fund and later Adore Pet Rescue, about a decade ago.

“They called me because I do have connections in the rescue community,” she said. “And there’s a fairly well-organized rescue network up and down the East Coast I could tap into.”

All it took was a social media post targeting her friends in the airline industry to find Ashes a way home.

A Southwest Airlines employee has volunteered to fly the cat back to New England on her next day off, once Ashes gets a clean bill of health from the vet. They’ll fly into Manchester, New Hampshire, which is three hours away from Cilley’s home in Maine.

“So, kitty still has some traveling in her future,” Cilley said.

Not much is known about where Ashes has been for the past nearly seven years. A young couple started feeding her as a stray in their neighborhood. Eventually, she let them pick her up and they took her to the vet, Cilley said.

Ashes had some health issues, the vet determined. She had an upper respiratory infection, dental disease, some missing teeth in her lower jaw, and a scabby coat. A GoFundMe fundraiser has been launched to help pay for Ashes’ medical and travel costs.

“She bounced back quickly, though. She has a good coat, a good body weight, and a good disposition,” said Williams, who has been fostering her since Monday. “She is incredibly sweet. She wants to be brushed, which is unusual for cats, but she loves to be combed.”

And Ashes still has the same squeak she had as a kitten.

“She has a squeaky little meow and always did, though at the time I figured it was because she was a kitten,” Cilley said.

While it’s frustrating that they’ll never know how Ashes found her way to Florida, the family is just happy she’s coming home.

“We have no idea,” Cilley said. “Maybe somebody found her in Maine, thought she was a stray, took her in and moved to Florida, and she got out and couldn’t find her way home.”

She added, “I wish she could talk.”

While Williams has seen many pet reunifications throughout her career, Ashes’ story “is definitely extreme,” she said. “From my perspective, this truly is proof positive that microchips work. They’re so inexpensive, it does not harm the animal, and this is one real reason why it needs to be an accepted part of getting a pet to make sure they’re identifiable.”

Cilly agreed, adding that Ashes’ homecoming is thanks to “the miracle of microchips.”

She added, “They’re not that expensive and can save so much heartache if your cat ever gets out.”