Last month, a Westford, Massachusetts, resident named Dawn Felicani was walking near a partially frozen lake when she saw something shocking: a cat stuck in the middle of the water.

The cat was 40 feet from shore and trapped on a tiny piece of ice. He had nowhere to go and Felicani had no way of rescuing him herself. Panicked, she called the authorities, reporting to animal control that she could hear the ice cracking below the cat.

“She really got into a huge panic,” animal control officer Kirsten Hirschler told The Dodo. “She was sobbing and I was trying to keep her calm.”

While Hirschler and Felicani were on the phone, the cat dropped into the frigid water. At that point, it really seemed like all hope was lost.

Then, a miracle happened. Two men who’d been working on a nearby house, Nate Puza and Kristopher Seymour, noticed what was going on and jumped into a rowboat. Using a shovel as a paddle, Puza rushed over to the cat and got there just in the nick of time.

“He quickly accessed the cat and plucked him from the water moments before he surely would have succumbed to the frigid cold,” Westford Animal Control wrote in a Facebook post.

Puza and Seymour immediately wrapped the cat up in warm blankets. Hirschler arrived at the scene shortly after, where she found a safe but badly shaken up cat.

“He wasn’t moving very much,” Hirschler said. “He had shallow breathing. He was obviously cold to the touch.”

Hirschler was determined to do everything in her power to help the cat. When she brought him to the vet, it became clear just how dire his situation was. She wasn’t sure if he was going to pull through.

“They took his temp and it didn’t even register on the thermometer,” Hirschler said.

Thankfully, though, with the vet’s aggressive treatment, the cat started feeling better very quickly. The next step was to reunite him with his family. But since he didn’t have a microchip, there was no clear way of getting in contact with his parents.

Hirschler put a photo of the cat online, hoping his family would see it. Soon after, a couple reached out saying the cat was theirs and that his name was Tiki.

Tiki had managed to sneak out of the house the previous night and ended up near the lake. It’s likely that a predator chased him onto the ice, where he ended up getting stuck.

When the couple came to pick up Tiki, they revealed something incredible to Hirschler and the vets: not only was he blind, but he was also 20 years old.

Tiki’s age makes the rescue all the more miraculous — and proves just how tough Tiki is. According to Tiki’s parents, now that he’s back home, he’s not acting like someone who just went through a life-threatening experience. He’s just the same old Tiki.

“[We] can’t believe he made it through no worse for wear,” Jon and Melaney Arden, Tiki’s parents, told The Dodo.