The longest I've been separated from a cat was when Weasie (RIP) vanished one day during the spring of 1993. She was wearing a collar with her name and our phone number written on it. But no one called. No shelters had taken her in. Flyers went up around the neighborhood without any leads. And the worst-case scenario didn't seem to have occurred - she had not been found dead and taken away by any city department.
Three weeks passed. Having lost her brother forever not long before, I wasn't willing to give up my search. More flyers were printed. On a Sunday morning I distributed all 200+ of them throughout the local area, placing them directly into mailboxes. Mere days after that, I got an anonymous call from someone who told me Weasie was in the home of "pet rescuers" who lived about a ½ mile away and gave me their address and phone number.
It turned out that one of these people had carted her away from the next street over, and - disregarding the info on her collar - had decided to foster her for adoption. Weasie, cutting off her nose to spite her face, pretended to not know me and left the room when I arrived to identify her. But before she did I pointed out the fact that her info was readily available. And I noticed that her belly had been shaved. "We took her in and got her spayed."
"She had already been spayed! 
" I was also supposed to have second thoughts about reclaiming my cat because "our 7-year-old daughter has grown attached to her." RIGHT! To compromise I agreed to return that evening after the child had gotten a chance to spend some more time with Weasie, which also allowed me to round up the paperwork proving my ownership (or is that vice versa?)
When I came back later, Weasie only wanted to get back home and dropped the pretense of never having seen me before. She raced down the stairs to where I waited in the living room with her carrier. Into it she went without stopping. As I knelt on the floor to close the carrier door, she turned around inside. Then out came her right front paw. With claws retracted and a furious look on her face, Weasie hauled off and punched me in the nose!
This broke the ice perfectly. The "rescuers" were still laughing when we walked out the door. They had never let her leave the house during her involuntary weeks-long stay there. So knows when, or if, she might've managed to escape and find her way back to me.
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