Cheeto the cat is back home after four months on the lam.
The orange tabby escaped the day his family was evacuating from their Yarrow home during the atmospheric river event of November 16, 2021.
Somehow Cheeto managed to wriggle free of his kitty harness, just as his owners Chris and Jennifer Peters were arriving by vehicle to spend the night in Sardis.
He took off into the bush in a neighbourhood unfamiliar to him, which complicated things.
The Peters were forced to return home the next day when the evacuation order was cancelled, but without their beloved orange cat.
Now Cheeto is back home in Yarrow, warm and fed at last.
“It’s such a nice end to it all,” said Jennifer Forbes, who hosted Cheeto’s owners at her home the night they were evacuated in the flood.
They felt terrible about it. Forbes said the evacuation made it an incredibly hard day as it was for the couple, and then to lose their cat on top of it, made it worse.
“We tried to catch him but we couldn’t.”
They tried calling. Shaking food. Staying outside with heaters for hours, calling until after dark.
“He never did come to us. He was just so freaked out,” Forbes said.
There was no sign of him for weeks. They put up missing posters of the orange cat on social media. They kept looking.
“Then about four days ago, suddenly we thought he was in the backyard,” Forbes recounted.
The dog barked. A cat meowed.
Forbes thought it sounded like Cheeto. She called his people over.
When they got there, they started shaking the food box. Cheeto meowed back and came closer.
But they never did manage to get him that night.
The break came a few days later after the FCM Community Cat Trappers got involved, lending their gear to the Cheeto recovery effort.
The FCM cat trappers are volunteers working to better the lives of feral, barn, and stray cats across Chilliwack. Their volunteers have special wire cat traps, used in their spay-and-neuter program, and they were able to lend four of them out, along with a trail camera.
It was one of their traps, laden with food and his people’s clothing, that caught Cheeto.
Forbes said it was her friends, the Vugteveens who agreed to have a trap in their backyard.
One day the orange cat appeared in their trap, and the rest is history.
Jennifer Peters wants everyone to know how happy they were to have found Cheeto after so long.
“We got word on Friday night that he was spotted in the area so we went out looking for him. Four traps were put out and he was caught in one last night,” she posted on Tuesday, Feb. 22.
Cheeto has taken to following his people around the house, trailing them from room to room, lest he lose them again.
They are overjoyed to update all concerned with the good news.
“I think people love this story, with all the sadness and fear going on in the world,” she said. “It gives people hope. Cheeto is very happy to be home.”
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