It must have felt like heaven — a comfy lap, two gentle hands holding the kitten close as the miles sped by. But then without warning, Cleo the cat felt her world begin to spin.
“I could see it coming and I could feel we were starting to slip,” Amanda Egan said as she remembered the tire blowout and her van swerving uncontrollably. “I tried to brace myself, but there’s not much you can do. You just have to put it in God’s hands.”
Headed straight toward an Oregon Interstate 84 milepost marker and unable to turn the wheel, Amanda’s three little girls sat behind her in their child-safety seats, unaware of impending danger. The family pets — a small family dog and 7-month-old kitty — were the center of their attention.
“I could hear all my girls crying in the back,” Amanda said. “I’m glad there wasn’t a moment I couldn’t hear them crying.”
But what had been a bit of paradise for the Russian Blue feline and the Chug (Chihuahua-Pug) became chaos and the two pets panicked.
Before motorists could help Amanda and her daughters, the pets leapt through the shattered windows. Cleo, the cat, turned one way and Irene, the dog, turned the other. Sadly, the beloved pup ran into traffic while Cleo disappeared into the open grasses and sagebrush.
“My husband, Shane, never saw the accident and he was calling me. He was a mile ahead of us in Pendleton where we’d planned to meet, but he could see cars pulling off the highway,” Amanda said.
The family was traveling from Cedar City, Utah. Amanda and Shane, a photographer, were moving to Bellingham. It would take a couple of days to regroup then search for their missing pets .
“We didn’t know how to tell them about Irene,” Amanda said. “So they prayed for them both to make it back to Utah, or that they could find us in Bellingham.
Hope diminished after the Egans were forced to leave their pet behind.
“That day it definitely was cold,” Robin Harris of Pendleton, Ore., said as she remembered her drive to the hay barn, a place she only visits once a week or so. “When I walked over to the tractor to move the hay, I saw a flash.”
Robin had often seen feral cats in the countryside, but when she reached for the gray cat, something pink caught her eye.
“She was in the rafters of the barn,” Robin said, recalling how she could see a collar with a metal heart tag. “There was a phone number, and that’s unusual.”
“I answered my cellphone and I hear, ‘Hi, I have a gray cat on my lap and I think it might be yours,” Amanda said, reliving the surprising moment.
Robinis on the board for the Pendleton Animal Welfare Shelter and planned the logistics for getting Cleo home. By the end of another week, an “angel” traveling through Pendleton to the Northwest hand-delivered the kitten.
