By: Amelia Wang

On April 17, Carrie Clark received a phone call from a veterinarian that her cat, which had vanished from her home in Utah, was found some 500 miles away in California.

When Mrs. Clark received the news, she couldn’t believe that it was true. She thought that it had been a prank.

However, it wasn’t. Her six-year-old American shorthair named Galena, had stowed away inside an Amazon package alongside five pairs of boots, which was then shipped to a warehouse in California. It was in the warehouse, where Amazon employees had discovered Galena inside the box.

Shockingly, the cat had survived the journey across two states in with only dehydration and no other apparent issues. Two main reasons that Galena had survived was the fact that one of the seams had broken on the box, and that the weather was considerably mild.

“It’s really a miracle that she was able to survive,” Mrs. Clark said.

She believes that Galena jumped inside the box while her husband got tape to close it, but the added weight of the cat went unnoticed because the box already weighed over thirty pounds.

However, the disappearance of their indoor cat did not go unnoticed. After days of relentlessly searching the house and neighborhood, Mrs. Clark began to imagine multiple worst-case scenarios. Had Galena gone outside without anyone noticing and become the meal of a hungry predator? Or had she fallen into the river behind their house?

“We had absolutely no idea what had happened,” said Mrs. Clark. “It was really challenging; I was definitely in a lot of grief.”

Fortunately, she received a phone call telling her that Galena had been found by an Amazon employee, Brady Hunter. The cat identified using her microchip by a veterinarian in Riverside, California.

When Mrs. Clark got the call, she and her husband immediately booked a flight to California, so that the very next day, they were reunited with Galena.