George, the missing airport cat, is found alive

George, a cat once believed frozen to death at the Edmonton International Airport, has been found alive in a nearby town, three months after he escaped from his kennel in the Air Canada baggage area.

The Fort McMurray, Alta. feline turned up five days ago at the back door of a Leduc house, hungry but in fairly good condition.

"When we opened the door on the third day, he came inside, he's kind of been here since then," Hope Gulseth said. "He gets along with our other two cats. He's really affectionate."

Gulseth's husband started searching online to see if someone had posted anything about a lost cat. That's when he stumbled on the Facebook site devoted to the search for George that was posted on the online classified site Kijiji.

The site then led the couple to George's owner Vanessa Summerfield, who lives in Fort McMurray.

"It's unreal," Summerfield told CBC Radio's Kim Trynacity. "I don't even know what to think right now."

The discovery is a happy end to a story that's taken many turns since Sept. 23, the day George escaped from his kennel while ground crews unloaded bags off an Air Canada flight from Fort McMurray.

Two months later, the airline told Summerfield that her pet had been found dead, the victim of the extreme cold weather that hit the Edmonton area in mid-November.

But then an Edmonton veterinarian determined that the dead cat was a female who possibly just had kittens.

George, of course, is a male.