Hemi, an American Curl mix cat is shown at Craven County Animal Control in New Bern, N.C. The cat has spent the last four years wandering Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Cherry Point, N.C., but thanks to a microchip, his owners have been tracked down to their current home in North Dakota. (Bill Hand/Sun Journal via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
(Photo: Bill Hand/AP)
“It’s pretty crazy,” said Jennifer Connell, who adopted Hemi back in 2009 in North Carolina, but now lives in Bismarck, N.D.
Hemi was a mere kitten when Jennifer and her Marine husband, Robert, found him curled up on their car’s engine block located at their home in Havelock near Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station.
They weren’t going to keep him, but then they fell in love with the gray kitten with an unusual curl on the tips of his ears. His time under the car’s hood won him the cute name of Hemi.
When Robert Connell deployed back in 2011, he and his wife and their two children moved to base housing located at Cherry Point, Hemi disappeared.
In the meantime, Hemi had already begun to bond with Connell, helping him cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I wouldn’t say he’s my spirit animal, but I helped him. He helped me,” Connell told the Sun Journal of New Bern, North Carolina.
“He kept looking for my husband and couldn’t find him,” Jennifer Connell said. “And one day, he got out, and we were never able to find him.”
She called the shelter on a daily basis to see if Hemi turned up, and returned to their old home several times a week to look for the cat.
Craven County (N.C.) Animal Control Supervisor Trinity Smith cuddles with Hemi. (Photo: Bill Sand, AP)
“He was my husband’s cat,” she said. “And I had to tell him Hemi ran away.”
In 2013, Connell left the Marines for a job to work as a train engineer, and the family moved to Bismarck, still heartbroken about Hemi.
Then lust just week, a woman called the Craven County, N.C., animal shelter about a cat that had been hanging around her house. Shelter staff found a microchip on Hemi and called the number.
“Are you missing Hemi?” animal control supervisor Trinity Smith recalled asking Jennifer Connell. “She cried when we called her.”
No one but Hemi knows just where he’s been since 2011, and Hemi isn’t talking.
Robert Connell drove from Bismarck to the Craven County, North Carolina, animal shelter to pick up Hemi this past Monday. Connell says he decided to make the drive after a winter storm which nixed plans for a family friend to fly Hemi to Bismarck.
“What have you been up to?” Connell asked his cat Monday. “Are you ready to come home and be spoiled?”
There’s no place like home.
Photo credits: Bill Hand