At 12 years old, he wandered the wilderness for nearly 80 days and trekked three-and-a-half miles across Marlton to return to his friends. Also, he’s a cat.
Brutus, a small tiger tabby cat weighing only eight pounds, is the “patriarch” of a group of a dozen or so cats that make their home in a wooded area of town.
Local resident Denise Brown, one of Brutus’ many fans, tells the story.
“I’ve known him for three years,” Brown said. “A vet tech was taking care of the colony and she told me he was 12 years old, and other people when we were back in the woods have told me ‘oh that cat has been there for years.’”
Brown and others have named Brutus the “greeter” of the group because he is the one to always run up to any visitors, looking for anyone to scratch his head.
From word of mouth and people just normally walking the woods, the cats regularly attract people coming to visit.
“I can’t believe all the people that go visit them,” Brown said. “Boys go back there on their bikes, people drop their cars off and go walk, it’s just funny all the people that go back there just for the cats.”
However, with Brutus’ advanced age, Brown said another woman and her husband who sometimes visit Brutus had noticed that the past few winters had been rough on him, with Brutus getting colds and infections and his hearing starting to decline.
With such harsh weather expected at the onset of this year’s winter, the couple believed it was finally time for Brutus to retire, so they adopted him.
“They took Brutus in for the winter because he’s been getting sick a lot…before the polar vortex came she said ‘let me take him in,’” Brown said.
The couple took Brutus to their home, about three-and-a-half miles away from the woods, where he could live out the rest of his days in warmth and comfort.
They set up a large kennel with a warm bed for Brutus and provided him with food and toys as he became accustomed to the other cats the couple already owned.
Brown said Brutus’ new owners reported back that he was happy inside, and never even followed the other cats outside through a kitty-door during the winter.
However, once the cold weather broke and spring arrived, Brutus was ready to start exploring the outdoors once again.
It was one day in late March when Brutus simply didn’t return. The couple did everything they could to find Brutus. They checked shelters. They posted flyers. They drove roads again and again, stopping to check every remotely fuzzy animal that had met its end.
The couple never found Brutus, and as fate would have it, it was on Friday, June 13 that the wife of the couple finally told Brown and a friend, yet another fan of Brutus’, that Brutus had gone missing.
“She said ‘do you want to know the truth? Well he’s been missing for a few weeks.’ So then we were like, ‘oh my god,’ and we were so sad,” she said.
Brown and her friend had regularly placed trail cameras near the cats’ home to observe wildlife in the area, but when they checked the footage, there still was no sign of Brutus.
However, when Brown’s friend went to visit Brutus’ former home in the woods just two days later, she couldn’t believe her eyes. What did she find but Brutus, right back where he had started.
Upon checking the trail camera footage once more, it showed Brutus returning in the dark hours of that very Sunday morning.
It took Brutus about 80 days, but he eventually found his way back to his friends.
“We looked into it and 40,000 cars travel through the Route 70 — Route 73 corridor on a daily basis,” Brown said. “How did he do that when he’s kind of hard of hearing and his smell isn’t that good? How did he eat? We don’t think he hunts. What was he doing for food? What was he doing for shelter? It’s just truly amazing.”
