When Jenn Ivimey’s cat Icky, 10, bolted out her back door on Dec. 10 and into the downpouring rain, she spent all night outside looking for him. That rain turned into thick snow and when FEH-BOCES, where she works, announced a snow day the next day, she printed missing fliers and gave them to her neighbors. By the time heavy rain started again, bringing flooding last week, Ivimey had no leads and had given up all hope of seeing Icky again.

On Dec. 19, she got a text from a man in Onchiota saying Icky had just walked up to his kitchen door and meowed to come in. She couldn’t believe it.

Ivimey left food, water, a litter box and a blanket on the porch to attract him home, but with a heavy layer of snow, it likely covered the scent. She posted on a Facebook group, Saranac Lake Neighbor Helping Neighbor, to let her neighbors know her cat was missing. But by the second day, she was already convinced Icky was never coming back.

The day that she got the text about her cat being found, Ivimey had just gotten home after a bowling practice with the local Special Olympics squad. When she read Joe Marocco’s text, she was shocked.

Ichabod (Photo provided — Jenn Ivimey)

“I was like … omg,” Ivimey said. This was not what she expected at all.

It was dark in Onchiota when something jumped up on Marocco’s kitchen door and hung there.

“It wasn’t our cat or our dog,” he said. “We thought, ‘That’s odd.'”

It was Icky.

Morocco went to the Tri-Lakes Humane Society website to see who to contact when he saw their “lost and found” section.

Ichabod (Photo provided — Jenn Ivimey)

This brought him to the shelter’s Facebook page with photos.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the cat,'” Marocco said. “It was unmistakable because of (Icky’s) ear.”

Ivimey adopted Icky over the summer as a companion cat for her elder cat Max, who was in hospice, as a way to perk Max up toward the end of his life.

She used to work at Tri-Lakes Humane Society, so she knows the importance of giving special needs cats homes. Icky has FIV, the feline equivalent of the HIV immunodeficiency virus, so for him to be missing outside was that much scarier. He had trauma to one ear, causing it to crumple and appear like the “cauliflower ear” injury that some boxers get. He’s missing some front teeth. And his coat is not great.

“He looks rough on his best days,” Ivimey said.

But it was love at first sight.

Icky’s nickname for him is “garbage cat” because he’ll eat garbage if she doesn’t stop him. He spent their first few weeks together sneezing snot on her.

Ivimey bumped into a friend at Stewart’s as she fueled up for her rescue trip last week. The friend advised her that she shouldn’t go to a stranger’s house in the woods whose address didn’t show up on Google Maps, alone, based on a description of a cat. Marocco sent a photo and confirmed it was Icky.

“It didn’t take much to entice him to come in, let’s put it that way,” Marocco said. “He was really friendly.”

Ivimey said that tracks.

“He’s a very confident cat,” she said. “He is a dog in cat form.”

Icky lounged around Marocco’s house like he owned the place, rubbing on everyone and eating big bowls of food.

When Ivimey finally picked him up and Icky felt OK — he hadn’t lost weight, he wasn’t bony — that’s when she started crying.

“He’s fine. It’s like it never happened,” Ivimey said. “He has a little bit of a sniffle.”

She keeps asking him, “How did you get out there?”

“I would love to know,” she said. “I’m never going to know.”

There are a couple clues as to what Icky was doing for those nine days, though they raise more questions than answers.

Ivimey said he was “pristine,” well, relatively clean, for a cat with the nickname “garbage cat.” He was gone through two major weather events — snow so thick it closed schools and flooding that damaged roads and made rivers spill over their banks. His white feet weren’t even muddy, she said.

He also hadn’t lost any weight.

“And he smells like fried food,” Ivimey said. “Like a dirty deep fryer.”

“I have no idea how he got to Onchiota,” Ivimey said. “My best guess is he got in a vehicle somehow. Maybe the bed of a truck.”

Marocco does not know how Icky got all the way to their home, either, and remarked that he looked fine and clean.

“It’s really a puzzle,” Marocco said. “It really was bugging me for a couple days. I was really trying to figure it out and I just gave up.”

He saw tracks the night Icky came in, but he didn’t follow them. He thinks Icky was indoors for a while and he knows a cat couldn’t have possibly walked all the way to his door from town.

Marocco said Icky ate a couple bowls of food so he thought he was famished, but Ivimey said that’s how he usually is.

“No, he just eats everything in sight,” she said. “Maybe he was hungry, but that’s just his normal state of being.”

“What an amazing adventurer he is!” Marocco texted Ivimey.

Ivimey said Icky’s absence was also hard on her dog Whim.

“I sleep with all my animals in my bed because, why not?” Ivimey said. Icky by her head and Whim by her feet.

They have a routine. Icky gets in first and Whim gets in last. But on the nights Icky was gone, Whim was not settling down for bed.

When Whim, who is not a sniffy dog, was sniffing outside, she believes he may have been looking for his feline friend.

Ivimey wanted to take the opportunity while she shared her story with the community to vouch for people to adopt special needs animals. They really need love, she said. Specifically, she’s hoping someone will adopt a certain senior cat named “Frisky Business” from the Tri-Lakes Humane Society. Frisky Business is estimated at being over 20 years old and Ivimey said someone has sponsored her adoption fee, so there is no fee.

“She really should be in a home,” Ivimey said. “No animal wants to be in the shelter, and nobody wants the old ones.”

She said people who can’t adopt can support animals at the shelter by donating adoption fees to make it easier for others to adopt.

Ivimey said she was grateful for all the kind people in the community who helped search and supported her.

Some of her neighbors went out looking for Icky every day after work. A coworker at BOCES went and checked his cabin property in the area.

“People are so kind,” she said.

Ivimey clarified that this was not a Christmas miracle.

“Very many people have said that,” Ivimey said. “It makes me want to gag.”

She’s not a “Christmas person.”

She’s more of a person who wants people to take care of animals in need all year round.

“It’s so important to spay and neuter your animals,” Ivimey said.