GALVESTON, Texas -- For Choctaw the cat, there really must be no place like home.

The Daily News

Cathy Alston sits with her cat, Choctaw, and dog, Jake, in her Santa Fe home on Tuesday afternoon. The Alston family evacuated to Calvert before Hurricane Ike, but Choctaw escaped from her enclosure while there.

Max and Cathy Alston said they left Santa Fe for Calvert ahead of Hurricane Ike’s Sept. 13 landfall but made the return trip from Calvert without their 3-year-old feline.

On Sunday evening, 26 days after returning to their Avenue J home, Cathy Alston said she was shocked to hear Choctaw’s meow.

“How she got home, I have no idea,” Cathy Alston said. “The cat doesn’t have a collar or computer chip. There was no identification on her.”

With Ike churning toward Galveston County, Max Alston said he and his wife, three cats, two German shepherds, a Chihuahua, two horses and a bird left Sept. 11 for his dad’s home in Calvert.

“We don’t have any kids. So every time she wanted a kid, I bought her an animal,” Max Alston said.

Choctaw definitely made the trip to Calvert, the Alstons said, because they spent days listening to their cats crying for home.

On Sept. 17, the family prepared to come home, but Choctaw escaped her kennel and bolted outside through a screened window, the Alstons said.

“I was thinking that once she calmed down, she’d come back to my dad’s house,” Max Alston said.

The couple left food and water for Choctaw and called daily, but there was no sign of her in Calvert.

How she got to Santa Fe is a mystery.

“I did the math,” Alston said. “That’s six miles a day. The theories we came up with are even more unbelievable. Could she have gotten back in the car without us knowing it?

“Was she in the horse trailer all the way back? Unless she rode under the hood for 162 miles, there’s no other explanation for it.”

The first thing the Alstons did upon their return was take the horses to their barn, five miles from their home, and then they cleaned the trailer, never seeing Choctaw in the process.

Cathy Alston said she went outside Sunday and heard Choctaw meowing from their front yard ditch.

Once she lured the skittish, spayed, black cat to her, she took her inside and immediately knew it was Choctaw — the cat wasn’t afraid of the dogs.

The cat had the same white stripping under her fur and immediately began suckling her shirt, just as she’d done since she was a kitten.

Cathy Alston said Jake, one of her German shepherds, and Choctaw are like brother and sister, with the pair inseparable since Choctaw was a kitten.

“I brought her in the house, and she started rubbing up against Jake,” Alston said. “A stray wouldn’t do that. I still can’t believe it.”