Imagine losing your cat on the very day that you are planning to move thousands of miles away. And then, miraculously, someone finds your feline friend a few weeks later. But by that point, you’re so far away that you can’t afford to fly or drive back to bring him back.

This is exactly what happened to a woman from Seattle, whose cat ran away on July 4th weekend as she was packing the car for her move to Ohio.

The woman delayed her trip two weeks while searching in vain for Itty Bitty, her 14-year-old orange and white tabby pal. But eventually she had to leave.

Then a neighbor found the cat and called the folks at Seattle cat shelter Kitty Harbor, who wrote that Itty Bitty “was in poor shape, starving, a fresh deep gash in his neck and a bloody mouth with teeth missing.”

With the cat healing in the shelter, his relieved owner and Kitty Harbor went on Facebook trying to figure out a way for someone to help reunite her with Itty Bitty, who was still in too poor health to travel in the cargo section of a plane.

That’s how an employee for Alaska Airlines learned about the situation and figured she could work Itty Bitty’s return into her travel plans.

“We hadn’t seen Chicago yet, so I thought, why not,” she explains. “We can help out, and see the sights at the same time.”

But since Chicago is still many hours’ drive from Dayton, OH, where Itty Bitty’s owner had moved, the airline employee rented a car and drove out to Indiana to meet her halfway.

“We have two cats and I couldn’t imagine being without them,” said the employee. “They really are part of your family.”

[via SeattlePI.com]

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