You might have heard about Pumpkin (right), the cat that spent three weeks in a cargo hold after breaking out of her travel carrier while en route from England to Washington, D.C., and how it was finally found last week when the plane landed in Denver. Well, W.W. Norton editor Thomas Mayer thought the story sounded familiar, and then he realized: He’d read something just like it in A Tale of Two Lions, the novel he’d acquired for Norton from Mexican novelist Roberto Ransom, which we’ll quote now:
“According to the airline, the first mistake was not unloading the cage at La Guardia. The cat then got out of the cage on a flight from Frankfurt to Los Angeles. So far in his odyssey—he would by now be up to some twenty-some days, and almost 100,000 miles, or seven times around the globe—he has visited three continents, and it is thought that he has been through London, Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Madrid, and Nice.”
Eerie, innit? Anyway, for more on the real Pumpkin’s journey, watch the BBC News report.