At the edge of their campground in Yellowstone National Park in June, Suzanne and her husband, Benjamin “Benangi” Anguiano, were looking out over a forest of lodgepole pine trees. The ground was covered with broken branches and piles of dry, old trees that had fallen on top of one another.
The Anguianos were upset and distraught: Somewhere in that woods was their small, gray Seal Point Siamese cat, who had escaped from the Fishing Bridge RV Park.
For five days the couple searched the area, calling for their 2-year-old cat, Rene Beau (pronounced “Rainbow”). They used cat food and toys to lure him back.
Benjamin and Suzanne Anguiano in Yellowstone National Park.
(Benjamin and Suzanne Anguiano)
But it took several weeks to finally be reunited with his beloved pet, a tearful reunion that by some miracle happened hundreds of miles west in California.
There is no shortage of stories about pets traveling long distances to get home. In 2012, a black Labrador traveled a long distance to get home. Buckeye Walked 500 miles from Virginia to South Carolina, eventually meeting his owner.
Hollywood has even made movies about them – take 1993’s “Homeward Bound,” in which an American bulldog, a golden retriever and a Himalayan cat travel across the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco to meet their family.
And now, there’s Ren Beau.
Although it’s been a month since the cat returned home, the Anguanos didn’t feel comfortable talking about the incident until this weekend, as they wanted to know if anyone had helped the cat make the more than 800-mile journey from Yellowstone to California.
In a phone interview Friday, Suzanne Anguiano said everything started June 4 when the couple arrived at the campground. She said she was trying to transfer Rain Beau and his sister, Star, a flame point Siamese cat, from the truck to the travel trailer.
Anguiano said she was untying the cats’ leashes when Ren Beau jumped out of the car, broke free of his collar and ran into the woods.
“I screamed,” she said. “I swear, I think the whole campground heard me.”
She ran after Rain Beau, leaving the truck door open and the other cat behind. She said her husband closed the door to prevent the other cat from escaping.
She said that Ren Beau ran into a log, where she tried to pick him up, but this made him run away again, this time deeper into the forest. Eventually, she couldn’t see him.
The next day he reported the cat’s disappearance to the Ranger’s office and also provided its photograph.
“Every morning I would go out for an hour and call out,” she said. “Even his sister would call out to him from the safety of the trailer’s screen door.”
The couple spent days searching for him in the woods, calling to him, even attempting to lure him out at night with tuna fish and toys.
“But he never showed up,” she said. “Then the day came when we had to move and it was horrible.”
“I felt like I was abandoning him,” she said.
As his truck left the campground on June 8, Anguiano stared out the window, crying, calling out and looking at the road.
“I knew it was frustrating to do that, but I did it anyway,” he said.
The ride home was gloomy. The couple didn’t talk, and Star clung to Suzanne. She worried that Rain Beau would get stuck in a tree or fall off it. Would he starve to death? No, she told herself, there were plenty of mice out there for him to survive on.
Suzanne Anguiano considered seeing a double rainbow in the Nevada desert a sign of hope.
(Benjamin and Suzanne Anguiano)
As they were entering the Nevada desert, the couple saw a double rainbow. For Anguiano, it was a sign that their cat was safe.
“I’m a Christian and I was praying the whole time,” she said. “God told me: ‘I’ve kept him safe,’ and that’s what I believed.”
It was July 31, and Alexandra Bates had just arrived at her job at Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Roseville, California. She remembered it was extremely hot, with temperatures in the triple digits. She was walking across the parking lot to the hospital when she heard screaming in the bushes.
Bates said it sounded like a cat going into labor or pregnancy, so she went over to see. There, she saw a small brown cat lying near a storm drain.
She stayed with it for a few minutes before going to work. Her co-workers told her the cat had been there for several days and probably belonged to someone nearby. Bates didn’t believe it. It didn’t seem right to her that the cat would yowl in the same place for several days.
Alexandra Bates found a panting cat during triple-digit temperatures in Roseville, California. She took him home and posted photos in hopes of finding the owner.
(Alexandra Bates)
She asked her sister, who once worked at an animal shelter, and learned that cats that scream are either in distress, in heat, or lost.
Bates ordered cat food from DoorDash. She went out to feed the cat during her lunch break.
“I could tell it was some type of domestic cat because it recognised the sound of a can opening,” she said.
But the heat was taking its toll on the cat. Bates said the cat was panting and she felt it should be brought home.
Bates was no stranger to helping animals. She had a cat herself and had fostered several cats over the years. The next day, on a Thursday, she brought the cat home in a carrier.
He said he took photos that night and uploaded them to his Facebook account. Roseville Lost and Found Pets.
The cat stayed with the family and kept playing till Saturday.
“It was a very sweet cat,” Bates said. “My son wanted to keep him, but I said to him: ‘If your cat Ninja is gone, how would you feel if you never see him again?'”
She said they had to do everything possible to get the cat back to its owner.
She took the cat to the Placer Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Roseville on Aug. 3. She updated her post on Facebook that day to let people know where she took the cat.
Bates took more photos of the cat after bringing it home, where she said it loved to be petted. Her son wanted to keep it, but she took it to the shelter so it could have a chance to be reunited with its owners.
(Alexandra Bates)
Placer SPCA CEO Leilani Fratis said the cat was in great condition when it arrived at the shelter. She said staff immediately scanned the pet for a microchip, and it had one.
“What’s really amazing is that of the more than 1,000 cats that come into our shelter,” she said. “Only 23 cats are reunited with their owners and one of those, a teenager, is microchipped.”
“Microchipping is especially important for cats, as it can be hard to put a collar on them,” he said.
He hoped the story would encourage more people to microchip their pets if they haven’t already done so.
Susan Anguiano got a call Saturday afternoon, but she didn’t pick up. The number didn’t show the Placer SPCA. In fact, the shelter had to call her daughter to tell her the news.
Still, Anguiano didn’t believe it. She thought it was a scam. She Googled the number to make sure it matched the Placer SPCA in Roseville.
She called them and asked if they had Rain Beau. They told her they had Rain Beau. She asked them to describe the cat and they described him too.
While she was talking on the phone, her husband came in and told her that he had received a text message that Rain Beau had been found.
“Wait, is this really happening?” he remembered saying to himself.
She said her husband had asked the shelter for photos. When they received the photos, the couple was stunned: It was Rene Beau.
“Eight weeks of hoping and praying came full circle,” he said. “We were stunned, we hugged and cried, it was pretty surreal.”
The next morning, they arrived in Roseville, about four hours from their home in Salinas. They walked into a shelter and were reunited with Ren Beau.
Shortly after, Anguiano said she took the cat to the vet.
“He was very skinny,” she said. “He had lost 40% of his weight.”
They said his blood tests showed low protein levels, and the soles of his paws were dry, cracked and hard, evidence of his spending a lot of time alone.
Anguiano said they wanted to thank the person who found their cat, but due to privacy reasons the shelter couldn’t release that information.
However, a few days later her husband found Bates’ Facebook post. He was able to thank her and provide some insight into the story.
“She is the only woman who has done something. She is our hero, our angel,” he said.
Bates was overjoyed to hear that the family was reunited with their pet. She was also happy that she decided to help Rain Beau after learning about his long journey.
“I think everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to.”
