Cat Lover Undertakes Dogged Pursuit for Pet

The glowing eyes disappeared into the night, but Elena Cox was elated. Maybe she finally had found her cat on this farm 40 miles from home.

After all, there were so many stories about cats making their way back to their owners from a thousand miles off, about a Mr. Fluffy or a Ms. Kitty suddenly showing up in the doorway, tattered and yowling. So it wasn’t out of the question that Hot Rod had been lurking in the pumpkin patch, gathering his strength for the miraculous trip home.

Cox had combed these fields for weeks. Morning and night, she drove from her lakeside house in Westlake Village to the old Faulkner Farm in Santa Paula. She’d pad through the fields, all 27 acres, calling “Hot Rod! Hot Rod!” At night she’d bait a trap and watch from her car, hoping.

Yes, she knew it was a bit strange. But it was no stranger than the path that brought her here.

One August weekend, Cox sold her old couch. An affable stranger saw her ad, showed up with $250 and hauled the couch off in his van.

The next morning, Elena and her husband Mike didn’t see the big floppy Maine coon cat they’d had for six years.

“You think he might have hopped into the van?” Elena asked her husband.

No way, he said. He had helped load that couch and said he would have noticed if Hot Rod had jumped in with it.

Elena Cox did the things that grieving cat owners do. She dropped by the animal shelter and posted fliers. She even consulted her friend’s psychic, who confirmed that Hot Rod had not jumped into the van.

“I’d never done that kind of thing,” said Elena, an animation artist and mother of two grown boys. “But we were just so attached to that cat. He was sick when we got him from the shelter. We nursed him back to health. He was a part of us, like a lovely family member.”

Still, Hot Rod was gone, maybe for good. Desperate, Cox knew she had to find the man who’d bought her couch. Her only clue was that he had stopped earlier at a home in Simi Valley to buy a couple of pine end tables.

Checking the classifieds for that weekend, Cox called a few puzzled garage sale holders before she hit pay dirt: Yes, a woman reported. She remembered the man. She remembered the van. No, she didn’t get his name. But he said something about teaching agriculture at some ranch in Santa Paula.

Excited, Cox called around Santa Paula. But she came up empty; nobody at the Chamber of Commerce or the schools or the Police Department could help her out. Finally, she called a nursery.

“Oh sure,” the man said. “I think they teach farming over at--well, I can’t remember the name. Sorry--but, well, wait a minute now. I do remember it’s the same name as the street our Kmart is on. But offhand, I can’t remember that either . . . .”

Santa Paula’s Kmart is on Faulkner Road. And sure enough, when Cox called Faulkner Farm--the site of the University of California’s Hansen Agricultural Learning Center--she found that yes, someone here did buy a couch. And yes, he did find a cat in his van!

Cox practically flew up the freeway to Santa Paula. Nervously, she showed photos of Hot Rod to Doug Peters, the farm’s astonished manager.

“Yup,” he said. “That’s the cat.”

Peters had unloaded the furniture at the farm. When he returned to his van, he found this huge shaggy cat curled up near the gas pedal. Figuring it was a stray that had just climbed aboard, he gently picked it up. But it wriggled from his arms and ran into the fields.

That’s how Cox came to be here on this particular night, watching and waiting. The farm had two resident cats but employees told Cox that more food than usual was vanishing from their outdoor dishes, gobbled down by a possum, a raccoon, or . . . .

“Hot Rod! Hot Rod!”

Something was in the trap and Cox knew what it had to be. But it wasn’t; it was a tabby shorthair with a crooked tail--maybe someone else’s beloved, missing cat--but not Hot Rod.

Such disappointments have left her undaunted.

She has gone on to stuff fliers in dozens of farm mailboxes--only to be called by a postal official, who warned her she was committing a federal offense.

“I was so upset,” she said. “I told him it’s just a cat. I’m just looking for my cat . . . .”

Cox has done everything but put Hot Rod’s picture on a milk carton. She has listed him on a missing-pets Web site. She has knocked on doors on the rural roads around Santa Paula asking strangers to keep their eyes open for a 12-pound gray-black big, floppy, neutered male. She runs a classified ad in local newspapers, offering a $500 reward. From time to time, she gets a call and races up to Santa Paula, posting herself in a field here or by a barranca there for a glimpse of the elusive Hot Rod.

She kicks herself for not fitting him with a collar or having a vet implant an identifying microchip.

One day, she realizes, this will pass. Until then, she’ll know she’s done all she can--even if the quality of a cat lover’s grief might strike others as a little crazy.

“It’s really tough,” she says. “A lot of people don’t understand. Some even call up and offer to give me a cat, but I’m not ready yet. I want Hot Rod.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.