Missing house cat makes incredible trek from Yellowstone to California
At the edge of their campground in Yellowstone National Park in June, Susanne and her husband, Benjamin “Benny” Anguiano, gazed at the lodgepole pine tree forest. The ground was covered with piles of broken branches and dry, old trees that had fallen on top of one another.
The Anguianos felt overwhelmed and distraught: Somewhere in that forest was their small, brownish seal point Siamese cat that had run off from the Fishing Bridge RV Park.
For five days the couple searched the area, calling out for their 2-year-old cat named Rayne Beau (pronounced "rainbow"). They used cat food and toys to try and lure him back.
But it would be weeks before they would reunite with their beloved pet, a tearful reunion that by some miracle would also take place hundreds of miles west in California.
There is no shortage of stories about pets traveling great distances to get home. In 2012, a black Labrador named Bucky walked 500 miles from Virginia to South Carolina, eventually reuniting with his owner.
Hollywood has even made movies about them — take 1993's "Homeward Bound," in which an American bulldog, a golden retriever and a Himalayan cat make their way through the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco to reunite with their family.
And now, there’s Rayne Beau.
Although it has been a month since the cat returned home, it wasn’t until this weekend that the Anguianos felt comfortable enough to talk about the incident, in part because they want to know whether anyone helped the cat travel more than 800 miles from Yellowstone to California.
In a phone interview Friday, Susanne Anguiano said everything began June 4 when the couple arrived at the campground. She said she was trying to transfer Rayne Beau and his sister, Star, a flame point Siamese cat, from the truck to the traveling trailer.
Anguiano said she was untangling the cats’ leashes when Rayne Beau jumped out of the vehicle, slipping out of his collar before dashing toward the forest.
“I screamed,” she said. “I swear, I think the whole campground heard me.”
She ran after Rayne Beau, leaving the truck door open and the other cat behind. She said her husband shut the door to prevent the other cat from escaping.
She said Rayne Beau ran under a log, where she tried to scoop him up, but that caused him to run off again, this time deeper into the woods. Eventually, she lost sight of him.
The next day they reported the cat missing with the ranger’s office, providing a photo.
“Every morning I went out for an hour and called,” she said. “Even his sister, from the safety of the screen door of the trailer, meowed for him.”
The couple spent days searching the forest, calling out for him, trying to entice him with tuna and toys well into the night.
“But he never showed up,” she said. “Then came the day when we had to leave, and that was horrible.”
“It felt like I was abandoning him,” she said.
As their truck pulled out of the campground on June 8, Anguiano looked out the window, crying, calling and scanning the road.
“I knew it was hopeless to do that, but I did it anyway,” she said.
The ride home was somber. The couple didn’t talk, and Star clung to Susanne. She worried about Rayne Beau getting stuck in a tree or falling from one. Would he starve? No, she told herself, there were plenty of mice he could live off.
As they were entering the Nevada desert, the couple saw a double rainbow. For Anguiano, it was a sign that their cat was safe.
“I’m a Christian, and I was praying the whole time,” she said. “God told me: ‘I have him safe,’ and that’s what I hung on to.”
It was July 31, and Alexandra Betts had arrived at her job at Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Roseville, Calif. It was hot, and temperatures were in the triple digits, she recalled. She was making her way from the parking lot to the hospital when she heard yowling coming from some bushes.
Betts said it sounded like a cat in heat or in labor, so she walked over to take a look. There, she noticed a small brownish cat near a storm drain.
She stayed with it for a few minutes before going into work. Her co-workers told her the cat had been there for days and probably belonged to someone nearby. Betts didn’t buy that. A cat yowling and in the same spot for days didn’t seem right to her.
She checked in with her sister, who once worked at an animal shelter, and learned that cats that yowled were either in distress, in heat or lost.
Betts ordered cat food from DoorDash. On her lunch break, she went out to feed it.
“I could tell it was a house cat of some kind because it could register what the sound of a can opening was,” she said.
But the hot weather was starting to take its toll on the cat. Betts said it was panting, and she felt she needed to bring the cat home.
Betts was no stranger to helping animals. She owned a cat herself and had fostered many felines over the years. The next day, a Thursday, she brought the cat home in a carrier.
That night, she said, she took photos and uploaded them to the Facebook account for Roseville Lost and Found Pets.
The cat stayed with the family until Saturday, snuggling and playing.
“It was just the sweetest cat,” Betts said. “My son wanted to keep him but I told him: ‘If your cat Ninja got out, how would you feel if you never got to see him again?’”
She told him they needed to do everything they could to get the cat back to its owner.
On Aug. 3, she took the cat to the Placer Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Roseville. She updated her post on Facebook that day to let people know where she took the cat.
Leilani Fratis, chief executive with Placer SPCA, said the cat was in fairly good condition when it arrived at the shelter. She said the staff immediately scanned the pet for a microchip, and it had one.
“What’s really incredible is that we get over 1,000 cats that come through our shelter,” she said. “Only 23 are ever reunited with their owners and of that number, a teen of them are microchipped.”
“Microchipping is especially important for cats,” she added, “as it can be hard to keep a collar on them.”
She hoped the story will encourage more people to microchip their pets if they haven't done so.
It was Saturday afternoon when Susanne Anguiano got the call, but she didn’t pick up. The number didn’t show up as Placer SPCA. In fact, the shelter had to call her daughter to inform them of the news.
Even then, Anguiano didn’t believe it. She thought it was a scam. She Googled the number to make sure it matched that of Placer SPCA in Roseville.
She called the shelter and asked staffers whether they had Rayne Beau. They told her they did. She asked them to describe the cat, and they did that too.
As she was on the phone, her husband walked in and told her he had received a text message that Rayne Beau had been found.
“Wait, is this really happening?” she recalled telling herself.
She said her husband asked the shelter to provide photos. When they received them, the couple was stunned: It was Rayne Beau.
“Eight weeks of hoping and praying just came full circle,” she said. “We were blown away, we hugged and cried, it was just so surreal.”
The next morning, they drove to Roseville, about four hours from their home in Salinas. They walked into the shelter and reunited with Rayne Beau.
Shortly after, Anguiano said she took the cat to the vet.
“He was so skinny,” she said. “He had lost 40% of his body weight.”
She said his blood work showed low protein levels, and the pads on his paws were dry, cracked and calloused, proof that he had spent a lot of time on his own.
Anguiano said they wanted to thank the person who had found their cat but for privacy reasons the shelter couldn’t release that information.
A few days later, however, her husband stumbled upon Betts' Facebook post. They were able to thank her and provide some details of the story.
“She’s the only one who did something,” she said. “She’s our hero, our angel.”
Betts was elated to hear that the family had reunited with their pet. She was also happy that she decided to help Rayne Beau after learning about his long journey.
“I think everything lined up perfectly for it to work out the way it was supposed to work out."
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
