Do cats have nine lives? One Manitoba family thinks that might be the case.
Kerji Stephens’ 13-year-old cat, Kevin, has had a rough few months. He went missing for five days in January, survived a broken pelvis from being hit by a car, and was presumed dead after a devastating fire at the family’s St. Malo farmhouse.
The fire claimed some of the family’s other pets, and Stephens said Kevin’s loss was hard to take, especially after he’d been through so much already.
“All of us, my son included, we couldn’t get over Kevin, especially, because it just didn’t seem fair,” she told 680 CJOB.
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When the family returned to the house eight days later to say a final goodbye, they were shocked at what they found: cat prints in the snow.
“We just walked over to the porch, and I said, ‘aw Kevin’… and then I heard the ‘meow’.
“I started running toward the shed on the property, and I kept yelling his name, and he kept yelling back. He was alive. It’s crazy.”
Kevin had apparently sheltered in the shed for over a week in -40C conditions and survived for a reunion his owners never expected.
Recovering Kevin wasn’t the only good news in an otherwise bleak situation. Stephens said a friend’s prized guitar was also presumed destroyed in the blaze, but firefighters were able to salvage the instrument from the rubble of the home.
“I said to the fire inspector, I want to find her guitar. I know this means the world to her, this instrument. It’s been with her everywhere,” Stephens said.
“She went back and was able to find it. I don’t even know how. Looking at the place now, it’s all piles of things.”
A GoFundMe campaign to help the family rebuild their home had raised more than $18,000 as of Thursday afternoon.
