Virgil Wiebe had already had a frustrating travel day. The St. Paul, Minnesota, law professor missed his connection at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in September and was forced to spend the night. The next day, with time to kill before his rescheduled flight, he took his coffee and a cigar out to a small green space outside Terminal 1.
That’s when an orange kitten, roughly 3 weeks old, came out of nowhere and made a beeline for him.
“This little guy just charged up to me, like climbed on my foot,” Wiebe told KARE 11. “What are you supposed to do when a kitten kind of attacks you?”
Wiebe searched in the nearby bushes for a the cat’s mom or siblings but found nothing. He took a few pictures and texted his family back home, who wanted him to bring the kitten along. So he scooped it up and carried it inside to the ticketing counter, where nobody had trained for this.
“The TSA agent had no idea what to do, said they never seen a stray at the airport,” Wiebe told NBC Chicago. “They tried to be helpful, said ‘you’re gonna need a kennel.’”
United Airlines, as it happened, had just given away its loaner kennel, and his flight home was boarding soon. After airport staff confirmed no one had reported a missing pet, Wiebe called in backup. His daughter, back in St. Paul, tracked down a nearby Petco and had a carrier and kitten formula delivered to the airport through DoorDash.
United added the kitten to Wiebe’s reservation for a $150 pet fee, and the two boarded a flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul together.
Wiebe named him Macanudo O’Hare, after the cigar he was smoking and the airport where they met, but the family just calls him Harry. He’s since seen a vet, made friends with the household’s two other cats, and, according to Wiebe, “has a motor for a purr.”
Nobody knows how a 3-week-old kitten ended up loose outside one of the busiest airports in the world.
“He’s just a joyful little thing, and it’s so coincidental how it all happened,” Wiebe said. “Who knows where Harry came from, but now he’s ours.”
