"I said, 'I know this cat -- Midnight!'" Pimlott recalled, adding that she used to groom the cat while Brake's parents were cat-sitting, so she knew he had gone missing.

"With him being so big and so friendly, he stands out in the crowd, literally."

Midnight disappeared in July while Brake's parents were looking after him. He had wandered into the Horton Crescent area, where he decided to camp out under a trailer.

He was being fed regularly by some concerned neighbors, who assumed he was a stray. They eventually took him in and called the Yellowknife SPCA.

Volunteer Kathryn Paton came by to pick him up. Paton works at the Buffalo Airlines hangar, where the staff were always looking for a good "mouser," so she brought him into work a few weeks before Christmas.

"He fit right in. He was really affectionate ... everyone liked him," Paton said. "He was definitely someone's loved pet."

Paton attempted to find the owner through advertisements, but Brake's parents had since moved to Lethbridge and she never saw the ads.

In the meantime, the staff at the hangar named him Murgatroyd, but "I think he came to the sound of food more than anything," Paton said.

Midnight would regularly appear at coffee breaks in hopes of receiving a treat and it turned out that some days he was unknowingly fed up to four meals by different staff members. Consequently, he grew quite large.

"He's as big as I've ever seen him," Brake remarked of the purring eight-kilogram specimen she picked up last week. "I thought the foxes had got him."

Midnight had gone missing once before but only for a week.

"He did very well," Pimlott added. "He's like a small dog and he's so friendly."

Paton said the staff at Buffalo's hangar definitely miss Midnight.

"We would have been happy to keep him, but we're happier he's back at home," she said.