In mid-December, a terrible tornado struck Mayfield in Kentucky. Houses were as if they had been ground in a meat grinder, and Hoot Gibson did not believe that the black cat that was coming to their office could be found alive. The three-story house lay in ruins, and since the day the tornado blew the house, no one had seen the cat. Gibson and his family returned to the destroyed building every day and took apart the wreckage. They tried to save what had survived and hoped that they would be able to find Madix, the cat, to find her alive. But day after day passed, and their hope vanished.

A whole week has passed: even if the cat survived the collapse of the house, she clearly could not have survived all this time without food and water. But on the ninth day, a miracle happened. Gibson was working in the ruins on his day off when he thought he heard a faint meow. In disbelief, he called Madix by name – and he heard a distinct faint squeak from under the rubble. “My knees are weak, my chest is tight. “I’m having a heart attack,” Gibson recalls. There was a great temptation to rush to disassemble the wreckage with a vengeance, but the man was afraid that he might harm the cat.

He called two more staff members, and together they began to listen to the faint but persistent meows coming from under the rubble. Finally, they found Madix unharmed. The debris formed a kind of “pocket” in which the cat spent those nine days. Gibson took the rescued cat home. She ate three cans of food and drank a bowl of water. She was visibly emaciated and looked frightened, but did not seem to be hurt at all. The next day, the man took Madix to the vet. And she began a new life – already as his own domestic cat. Hugging Madix again after the owner considered her lost forever was a real miracle, and Gibson was sure that if cats have 9 lives, then Madix spent 8 of them sitting under the rubble.