As the days went by, they figured their cat was lost forever. They were wrong

By Mick Garry, for Pigeon605

Elmore entered Joe Eckert’s life through a chain-link fence. He’d wandered onto the small farm Eckert owns near Estelline and had attracted the interest of the family’s hunting dogs.

“He was small enough to get right through the fence and get away from my dogs,” Eckert said “He looked like a little ball of cotton.”

In time, Elmore and the hunting dogs became friends and running buddies on the farm and at the Eckerts’ home in southwest Sioux Falls.

 “He’s pretty much in charge of them now,” said Eckert, who owns the Best Western Vermillion Inn along with his wife, Lisa. “They all get along great, but he’s the boss.”

That’s probably a good thing. Because “the boss” in this case recently spent 11 days and nights on his own, roaming the streets of Sioux Falls. He’s back now safe and sound and looking like a million bucks, but there’s a good chance it never would have happened if not for a series of unlikely events that were pushed along by a lot of folks who wanted Eckert and Elmore to get back together.

Count the internet and social media as another factor in bringing about a reunion. As the digitally reluctant Eckert, who doesn’t even have a Facebook account, will tell you: “This was a great use of technology. We had people all over the country looking for Elmore.”

It all started when Elmore escaped from daughter Allison’s garage, worming his way through a barricaded dog door while the family was out of town.

When the Eckerts returned, Elmore was gone.

For three days, it was a boots-on-the-ground canvassing that ultimately went nowhere. They posted photos on various lost-pet websites and Facebook pages, but no one had seen the cat anywhere. It could not have been more discouraging.

“One day when I was out there, I talked with a guy who walks the area regularly,” Eckert said. “The guy told me not to get my hopes up because there were a lot of coyotes who lived on the edge of that neighborhood, and they’d killed pets in the past.”

Yikes.

“That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear,” Eckert said. “My cat had probably been eaten by a coyote.”

 Shortly after the Eckerts took in Elmore, the new owners went online and sought to find out what kind of cat the family was taking on. Eckert concluded it probably was a Turkish Van, which is an athletic and fairly independent breed relatively rare in the United States, but a popular choice for those willing to roll out a lot of money for a cat.

“All the Hollywood types and composers and famous people have Turkish Van cats,” Eckert said, laughing. “Google it and a cat who looks a lot like Elmore pops up. Except Elmore’s better looking than any of them in my opinion.”

That might have been, but there was no sight of him.

So after three days with all the channels covered, Eckert called off the search.

“It was a sad day,” he said. “I notified family members. We’d looked everywhere, called the Humane Society, distributed fliers — I was accepting the fact that he was gone.”

For three more days, Eckert hoped for the best but expected the worst.

And then came some breaking news. He received a text from a woman who’d seen the online posts. Her doorbell camera recorded an image of a cat that looked a lot like Elmore walking across her front steps.

Yep, that was Elmore. Elmore was alive. The search was back on.

Another canvassing of the area proved fruitless, however. Exhausted, Eckert and his search party stopped at Shenanigan’s Sports Bar & Grill in midafternoon to get lunch.

There, they struck up a conversation with Andy Rose, Shenanigan’s general manager.

“I told Andy we’d been out looking for this guy — and I showed him the picture,” Eckert said. “He took a picture of the picture and said he’d put it on their Facebook page, explaining that west-siders should be on the lookout for our cat.”

The next day, Eckert’s sister in Omaha saw that somebody had posted on the Facebook page. She reported the sighting to her brother in Sioux Falls. He received the news about 5:30 a.m. that Elmore had been spotted on Dominic Avenue. By 6, he was out on the streets again.

“I had both windows down yelling out of the car,” Eckert said. “It was ‘Here, kitty, kitty, time to come home!’ Then I saw a white cat in the headlights running across the snow in a yard.”

Eckert stopped the car, got out and walked toward his cat. Elmore was cautious at first, then growled out a few crazy sounds and let his owner pick him up.

He was no worse for the wear, as they say. As a cat who spent a lot of time on the farm, Elmore had developed life skills that came in handy while roughing it on the west side. Before the escape, he’d been an adept bird and mouse hunter.

“You think about all the technology and all the people involved in getting him back — it was like a miracle,” Eckert said. “A doorbell camera? And what if we hadn’t stopped at Shenanigan’s for lunch? The stars definitely lined up. We got our cat back.”