Teacher, student help missing cat find his home
Published: July 11, 2006
A kind teacher and an observant student at Amelia Earhart Elementary School helped make a miracle happen for a cat named Butterscotch and his family.
Butterscotch lives with Carol and Jim Rutecki in La Quinta. He had a three-week adventure that began on Mother’s Day.
Carol Rutecki was swimming in the pool that day, May 14. During that time, Butterscotch slipped out of the house.
The search for the little cat began soon thereafter.
“We’ve been married 38 years, and never lost an animal before this,” Carol Rutecki said.
The Ruteckis put up fliers and placed an advertisement in the newspaper. They even had a spot running constantly on the closed-circuit television program that Rancho La Quinta runs.
“We started a food chain going from the front gate, past our house, and beyond where he had been seen,” Carol said in an e-mail to some friends.
But the food went untouched. And, eventually, the couple gave up hope after Butterscotch had been gone for three weeks.
A technical mishap
Enter Nancy Duteau.
She’s a third-grade teacher at Amelia Earhart Elementary in Indio who lives near the Ruteckis.
Duteau was woken up by a cat crying outside her home one Thursday evening. She went out and fed the cat, thinking that would be it.
But the next morning, the little cat was still there. And when she returned home from school Friday night, the mysterious cat was waiting in her bedroom with her own two cats.
She knew then that the cat must belong to someone - someone who missed him.
So she took a picture with her digital camera. Her attempt to print it out at home was foiled by a broken machine though.
On Monday, she took her camera to school with her. This time she couldn’t print it out because she forgot the cable she needed.
So she showed the picture on the camera to her students and described the cat to them.
How fortunate those camera mishaps turned out to be.
The next night, one of Duteau’s students, Jacey Prahl, went to dinner at a pizza shop with her family.
While walking back to the car, Jacey looked at the lost flyers on the window of a vet’s office.
Butterscotch’s photo was among them.
Jacey told her mom and persuaded her to call Duteau.
Miracle cat
That Tuesday evening, Jim Rutecki got a phone call late at night.
“She said, ‘I think I have your kitten. Does your cat have a mustache?’” Jim Rutecki recalled.
The Ruteckis were skeptical at first, but the woman lived close by. They decided to check it out.
“We walked up to her door and she came out with Butterscotch in her arms,” Carol Rutecki said.
Now, Butterscotch is back at home - staying safe in the house.
“The whole thing is a miracle,” Carol Rutecki said.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
If you like this, you'll love Good Animal News:
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: