Earlier this year, a little gray cat called Rayne Beau (pronounced rainbow) embarked on an epic adventure, traveling 1,448 kilometers (900 miles) from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming back home to California.
The fearless feline got lost in America’s oldest national park while visiting with his family during a camping trip. Against all the odds, he turned up two months later just 322 kilometers (200 miles) from home.
Rayne Beau, along with owners Benny and Susanne Anguiano and another cat, arrived at Yellowstone’s Fishing Bridge RV Park on June 4, but it wasn’t long before he got startled and ran off into the forest, AP News reports. After looking for him for four days, the family returned home to Salinas, California, hopeful they would see his furry face again.
And thanks to the magic of microchips, they did. In August, 60 days after Rayne Beau went missing, the Anguianos received word from a pet-tracking service that he had been found in Roseville, California, and was at the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
He had been spotted roaming the streets by a woman who managed to capture him on August 3 and bring him to the shelter.
Exactly how Rayne Beau traveled the hundreds of kilometers from Yellowstone to Roseville remains a mystery, but his owners believe he had little help in doing so. When they collected him he was in a sorry state, and had reportedly lost around 2.7 kilos (6 pounds).
“I believe truly that he made that trek mostly on his own. His paws were really beat up. Lost 40 percent of his body weight, had really low protein levels because of inadequate nutrition. So he was not cared for,” Susanne Anguiano told AP.
She also shared news of the “traumatic” story on Facebook in September, as well as filming an interview for KSBW in the hope of uncovering more details about Rayne Beau’s trek.
“It was a very ugly feeling after we lost him,” Benny Anguiano told AP, adding that the family are now taking more precautions, fitting both cats with air tags and Rayne Beau with a GPS global tracker in case he sets off on any future adventures.
“We’ll have to practice camping at home and camp in the driveway to get him used to it.”
Rayne Beau isn’t the only intrepid animal to make headlines of late: check out Tico the manatee, who broke records with his 4,000-kilometer (2,485-mile) swim from Brazil to Venezuela. There was also the shorter, but no less epic, journey of lions Jacob and Tibu, who ventured across predator-infested waters in a movie-worthy saga.
