Cali.

A cat escapes after a freeway accident.

Cali

On April 15th, Rachael was driving on I-5 north through Tacoma.  As they took the 705 ramp, they turned the corner and traffic slowed, and they were rear-ended by a large truck.  She immediately checked to make sure her cat, Cali was okay, and she appeared uninjured.  Rachael didn’t know that the window was broken, and shortly after the accident, someone reported seeing Cali jump out the broken window and onto the trunk of the car.  No one saw her after that.  Cali, a ten-pound cat, had vanished in the middle of Tacoma, in a tangle of the busiest freeway interchanges.  At the point of the accident, the road deck was 30 to 40 feet off the ground.  The tow truck drivers said they thoroughly checked both vehicles and Cali was not hiding in either one, that they could see.

Mu and I arrived to search the area on Sunday, the 17th, at 2 PM.  We had to park several blocks away and walk under the freeway, along the railroad tracks.  We walked to where the accident happened, above us, about 40 feet south of where the ramps split.  To the east, the ground sloped up, and if Cali had jumped that way, her jump might have been 15 to 30 feet, depending on where she jumped, if she did.  On the west side, it was 40 to 50 feet above the ground, a height that cats have been known to jump in the past.  I had told Rachael about a previous case I had worked, where the cat got loose on a bridge, and he got up underneath, on the I-beams.  This structure was just smooth concrete on the underside, with no opportunities for a cat to hide up there.  The ground beneath the freeway was covered in garbage, either tossed from the freeway or left by transients.  The trash included various types of rotting food, needles, and human waste.  I had to keep a close watch on where Mu’s nose was at all times, to keep him away from hazards.  Every vertical surface was covered in graffiti.   Large patches of brambles offered great hiding places for a cat, but would be hard for us to search thoroughly.

I started an app on my phone to keep track of everywhere we went so that we could cover all the terrain and try not to skip any spots.  Mu and I worked the area underneath the crash site, looking for any sign of cat footprints or evidence that she had landed in that area.  Rachael pointed out a spot where she thought she saw blood, but Mu showed no interest there.  We worked all around the places she might have jumped down, and found no traces.  We expanded the search to the large patches of brambles, with Mu and I going in on one side while Rachael and her friends kept watch on the other side, in case Cali was flushed out of a hiding place.  It is never our goal to flush a cat out of hiding.  We would hope to locate her and then pull the search dog away so that Rachael could take her time coaxing Cali, but we positioned people to watch for movement, just in case.  Although Mu loves to find cats, they don’t always love to be found by him.

Up under another ramp, a group of tents were clustered at the narrowest point, where the ramp met the ground.  It had been fenced off, but the fence was cut.  It might have appeared to be an inviting refuge for a cat fleeing a freeway accident.  Mu and I went in through the fence and walked close to the tents.  I didn’t want to go up and talk to the people because they might see someone approaching with a large dog wearing a vest, and get the wrong idea.  No one has ever heard of a dog that finds lost cats, and they might jump to the conclusion that we were some sort of law enforcement.  I left them undisturbed, but made a note to come back and talk to them, without a dog, if we found no other leads.

Mu took me up into the large open space in the middle of all the ramps, southwest of the car museum.  Mu is not the type of dog that follows scent trails, usually.  His job is to work a grid and check all the hiding spaces.  When Mu does get onto a scent trail, I will often let him work it to see if he is onto something.  We have found cats this way in the past.  What we found, what Mu’s nose found, was coyote scat.  I took a photograph of it, and then poked it apart with my knife.  You can tell what coyotes have been eating because they ingest all of the fur and bones, claws and teeth too.  This coyote had been eating rabbits and rodents, it appeared.

We worked our way around the field and then back under the freeway.  At another space where the ramp met the ground, Mu showed more interest.  In the dry dirt under the ramp, I could see small footprints about the size and shape of a cat, but the dirt was too course, and I couldn’t see enough detail to be certain a cat had made those prints.  From under that ramp, heading toward the car museum, through a patch of brambles, Mu pointed out just a few hairs caught on a thorn.  I clipped the vine and took a picture of the hairs.  They appeared to be from a cat, not a rabbit, although I couldn’t say that for sure.  If the fur was from a cat, I couldn’t say definitely that it was Cali.  The length and color didn’t exclude the possibility that Cali had left that fur.  On that side of the ramp, it was much quieter, and it made sense that Cali would have moved away from the noisiest area.  From there, heading toward the car museum, we crossed another ramp that was less used, with a car every minute or so, as compared to the continual flow of the other ramps.

Between that ramp and the fence for the car museum was a thick hedgerow of ornamental shrubs tangled with vines and wild weeds.  Mu and I worked along that band of vegetation, and it was the area where he showed the most interest.  He had a look that suggested that a cat was in the area, but he couldn’t pinpoint it.  The wind kept shifting directions.  We found where transients had cut a large hole in the fence, and we passed through and went along the inside of the fence, trying to pinpoint a cat, while Rachael walked along the side by the ramp, watching for movement.  I did not want to search that hedgerow too aggressively because I didn’t want to spook Cali out of there if she was in there.  Mu did not pinpoint a particular spot, but it was the area where he had shown the most interest.  It was a logical place for a cat to be, safe from everything, and in a quieter, less busy area.

We had searched for three hours, and this was the only area where Mu had indicated a cat.  The people at the car museum were very kind and helpful, and they said they would watch for Cali.  I told Rachael that I couldn’t guarantee that Cali was in those bushes, but that they should come back and check at night, if possible, with teams working along each side and shining flashlights into the brambles, looking for eye reflection as they moved along in tandem.

A couple of days after we had searched, a volunteer was checking the area, searching for Cali, and the calico cat popped out of the bushes and walked up to her, happy and friendly, apparently uninjured.  Cali decided she was ready to go home.  Although I would have liked to have pinpointed Cali in those bushes, letting Mu get into the brush and work the scent, I think it was the better strategy to pull the dog back so that we wouldn’t flush Cali out of hiding.  Cali was eventually found in the area Mu indicated, about 250 feet from the site of the accident.  Cali had been in a wreck, jumped out onto the freeway, jumped off the ramp, maybe 30 to 40 feet down, made her way through dangerous debris and coyote territory, crossed another freeway ramp, and found a safe hiding place.  She was found four days after the accident, apparently unharmed.

If you or someone you know is in an accident, and a dog or cat is thrown from the vehicle or escapes, it is very likely that they will be found not too far away.  Also, dogs and cats are frequently known to survive accidents with few or no injuries, even in severe accidents where the driver died.  Cats will probably hide somewhere within 500 feet of the accident.  Dogs may run farther away, but usually they will return to near the accident.  After a recent fatal collision in Carnation, the little dog was seen running away from the wreck, but at some point he returned to the vehicle, when things quieted down, and climbed in, the last place he had seen his person.  The tow truck driver didn’t know the dog was inside when the vehicle was towed away. The little dog was found in the car, in the wrecking yard, when a passenger returned to get his wallet out of the wreck.

I hope you are never in a wreck with your pets, but if you are, and they escape, you still have a good chance of finding them if you take the right approach.  If your dog or cat is missing, don’t give up hope that you will find them.

Video of Mu working the case.