Several excellent years followed, during which time Sami blimped up to 13.5 pounds, enjoyed life, and escaped harm—not counting the little things, like him getting chomped on the face by an enemy and having to wear a cone for two weeks. He disappeared just before sunrise on the morning of December 12, 2015, when Susan let him out after he’d slept most of the night on a living room chair. Usually he would nose around for a while and then sit near the front door, waiting to be let back in and fed. But on that day, he didn’t return.It was now a month later. It snowed hard the day Sami vanished, plus a couple more times after that; most nights, the temperature plunged into the low teens. Various attempts to find him—a barrage of classified ads, posters, flyers, and boots-on-the-ground searches—hadn’t worked, and I had trouble imagining how Sami could survive that long in such frigid conditions.