May 31, 2006
By Katrina Cornwell
Gallatin News Examiner - Gallatin, TN
Ellie Mae ran away to parts unknown last month after the tornado flattened her Plantation Trace home. For the next seven days, she was lost but her owner, Jenny Tuck, never gave up on finding her beloved cat.
Tuck had lost nearly all her belongings, but the thought of losing her pet was breaking her heart. She was hundreds of miles away, in Memphis, when the tornado destroyed her neighborhood.
“A neighbor called to say, ‘the house is gone,’” Tuck said. “‘I don’t know how to tell you this but there’s no way Ellie survived.’”
Distraught, Tuck called her boss, Craig Hayes, who immediately set out to look for the cat in the middle of a hailstorm.
Hayes didn’t find Ellie Mae that day, so his wife, Martha, and their children, Austin, 10, and Ashley, 7, put a plan into motion to help Tuck bring her cat back home.
“She told me and I started crying,” Martha Hayes said. “She said ‘I have lost everything. If I could get my cat back, I’d be OK.’”
Martha Hayes went to a print shop and made some flyers with Ellie Mae’s picture on them.
“These guys were putting flyers up in businesses and in coffee shops,” Tuck said. “Everywhere you could think of, people were saying they saw her picture.”
Neighbors, friends, Sue Kloes, Susan Sircy and Michelle Banks, and even Tuck’s nail technician and her family joined the search for Tuck’s furry, feline companion. There were a few cat sightings and more than a few false alarms.
“We’d go right out to see,” Tuck said. “When we got out there, she wasn’t there. We were missing each other.”
On day seven, they got the break they’d been looking for when Tuck went to her old house to feed the cats next door and to look for Ellie Mae. That’s when something shining in the dark caught their attention.
“My mom saw her eyes,” Austin said.
Ellie escaped the storm virtually unscathed, except for a small cut on her tongue that was already healing.
“It was amazing that she wasn’t hurt seriously or anything,” Austin said.
Martha and the kids had been planning to find Ellie Mae and put her in an Easter basket for Tuck, but she found her cat first. Still, it felt like they had found something special.
“It was like an Easter present when we found her,” Ashley said.
Tuck was grateful for everyone’s help to reunite her with Ellie Mae.
“I would have never expected that the community would have pulled together, for people to stop their busy lives to look for my cat, it was amazing,” she said. “Thank You and God bless everybody. I guess she’s supposed to be with me. She’s my kitty.”
http://www.gallatinnewsexaminer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060531/MTCN0403/305310087/1312/MTCN04