Anchorage Daily News

After six months on the streets of Anchorage, a young exotic spotted cat named Simon was captured safely in a dipnet Friday morning and reunited with his owner.

Though on the run and on its own since spring, it was only in the past week that reports of the head-turning animal appearing at intervals between Fort Richardson and Point Woronzof -- roughly 10 miles apart -- began filtering in to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Nobody who saw it or heard about it was quite sure what breed of cat it was until it was nailed in the dipnet in an East Anchorage neighborhood.

"I didn't think I was ever going to see Simon again," the animal's owner, Sharon Gratrix, said Friday. "It looks like he's fended very well for himself, but he's a little thin. He's had two chicken wings and a bowl of dry food and he acts like he's ravished, but he always ate like he was ravished."

The cat was at first thought to be a serval, a wild, medium-sized African cat that can be several times bigger than a typical house cat and cannot be legally brought to Alaska because of concern about disease. Turns out Simon is a Savannah cat, a legal mix of a serval and a domestic cat first bred in 1986.

At his home in East Anchorage, Yukon Grubaugh, owner of Tall Tales Taxidermy, was reading about the loose cat in the newspaper Friday morning when a friend called him to report a sighting at Boniface Parkway and the Glenn Highway.

"I'm like, well, I'll go take a peek at it. So I drive over and it didn't take long to find it. It was out there stalking mice in the grass," Grubaugh said.

He went back to his shop, grabbed a salmon dipnet and a helper, Reid Spencer, and headed back out to apprehend the wayward animal.

"I kept the net kind of down and off to the side, and my helper kind of circled around behind him," he said. "Too many things for the cat to look at, and the cat looked pretty lethargic. The cat was definitely cold."

Jim Holmes, a wildlife technician with Fish and Game, said he got Grubaugh's call mid-morning. The cat was in custody of state officials a short time later, appearing docile and scared.

"The guy had it in a dipnet in the back of his truck in a camper shell," Holmes said. "It was just still curled up in the dipnet and (we) put on a pair of welding gloves. One of our other biologists grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and just kind of shuffled it real quick right into a dog kennel."

Simon was between 15 and 20 pounds -- about twice the size of an average house cat -- and was distinct because of his spots and striped, fluffy tail, Holmes said.

Afraid or not, six months on the road had given Simon a hearty appetite. The cat ate someone's donated lunch without hesitation when it was put in the kennel, he said.

Meanwhile, Gratrix called wildlife officials on Friday reporting that the loose, spotted cat she read about in the newspaper was in fact her Simon. The cat ran out the door of her home near Kincaid Park on Mother's Day and vanished.

Simon's disappearance was not the first time one of Gratrix's cats has gone missing in a high-profile way. In June 2007, her black-spotted Bengal cat, Bette, stopped coming home, prompting her to shell out $600 to get a mug shot of the cat on the back of People Mover buses. Bette, however, has never been found.

"When Bette never came home, I started looking at exotic cats," she said. "I wanted somebody to replace Bette but not be Bette."

Savannahs, with their "dog-like" personalities, were appealing, so she did her research and got Simon from a breeder in Illinois. Gratrix wouldn't say how much Simon cost, but she said Savannahs start at about $500 and can go up considerably.

She bought him as a kitten, and he ran away before his first birthday. Though Gratrix hadn't seen Simon since he was about six months old, she was able to provide a description, which wildlife officials matched to the recovered cat.

By Friday evening, he seemed to be readjusting to domestic life well, she said.

"It was incredible," she said. "He acts like he's going to be fine. And he's beautiful."

Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.

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