CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – James and Kate Scales’s pet cat, Elanor, disappeared on Halloween. Over the next four months, the Scales hung laminated flyers around their Woodbrook neighborhood and kept looking for the black and orange tortoise shell cat with the white striped nose.

But when the winter months brought some of the coldest and most sustained freezing temperatures the area has seen in recent memory, optimism that Elanor would return home began to fade.

“I thought about, ‘Do I need to take down those signs?” James Scales told Cville Right Now. “I didn’t go take them down because I still hoped.”

Then, on Monday morning, 120 days since Elanor had last been seen, a neighbor spotted the cat hanging out a half a mile across the neighborhood from the Scales’s Westbrook Pl. home. 

She was “meowing quite a lot,” according to a social media post by Chelsea Ann Kaihoi and “approaching several houses in the area.”

“I saw her on my driveway in the backyard and could hear her meowing loudly from the front of the house,” Kaihoi told Cville Right Now. “I texted with (my) next door neighbor who said she had seen it on her porch this morning. And then I noticed it hanging out at yet another neighbor’s front door. Seemed like it was looking for a way inside somewhere.”

It was less than an hour later, after feeding the family’s two other cats, that James Scales picked up his cell phone and checked Facebook.

He saw the post, rushed out his door and drove to the side of the neighborhood where Elanor had been seen.

“She was in somebody’s driveway,” James Scales said. “I called to her and I took a couple of steps toward her. She took a couple of steps back, and so I stopped. I sort of crouched down and held out my hand, called her name, and she approached, and I scooped her up.”

A trip to the veterinarian revealed Elanor had lost a pound and had poultry mites in her ears, most likely from eating birds, but was otherwise healthy.

“She came to us from the streets,” James Scales said. “We’ve lived with her as an indoor cat, but I think she’s always had a bit of the wanderlust.” 

The Scales, who have two daughters in high school, found the cat as a stray in June 2020, during the pandemic. They took her in as a house pet, but James Scales said she always had a wandering eye toward the outdoors. Soon after, they learned that Elanor – who they named after a character in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – was pregnant.

She gave birth to a litter of four kittens, three of which the Scales rehomed. The fourth, they kept and named Mystery. 

Elanor had run off once before, disappearing for seven weeks in the spring of 2023. She was missing for seven weeks, though neighbors frequently spotted her around Woodbrook. 

That buoyed the Scales’s hopes that Elanor would be found this time.

“But there had been nothing this time, no sightings at all,” James Scales said. “The snow and the ice and the single digit temperatures. It just seemed increasingly unlikely that we were going to find her again.”

The question that lingers is, where has Elanor been?

Mary Birkholz, president and founder of Caring for Creatures, Virginia’s first no-kill animal sanctuary, said there are a number of possibilities.

“Typically, a cat who’s been indoors most of their life and suddenly find themselves in an outside location, a lot of them freak out,” Birkholz told Cville Right Now. “It’s different. It’s not what they’re used to. And when that happens, they may have a panic attack, so to speak. And some of them will just run, until that panic adrenaline wears off. And then they might find themselves in a kind of faraway place where they’re not sure where they are.”

Birkholz said Elanor, with her past as a stray and instincts as a cat, could have hunted for food and found shelter, and survived for the four months. But the presence of predators, including foxes, in the area, combined with the freezing weather, would have made that particularly difficult in this case.

Just keeping their body temperatures up in the winter causes animals to burn more calories, Birkholz said. With the intense, sub-zero temperatures in the area in February, hypothermia and frostbite would also be serious concerns.

Birkholz said a more likely scenario involves a concerned person taking the cat in out of the cold and providing it with food and shelter.

“And that’s why she was gone for so long, because she was kept inside and being fed,” Birkholz said. “And the person who did so didn’t realize she belonged to someone.”

While James Scales said it may take a little time for his three cats to get used to being together again, Elanor quickly reclaimed her favorite spots among her humans.

“She was curled up on my wife’s lap,” he said. “She was curled up on mine and on one of my children’s beds.”