Before she had to flee her Sandy Lake First Nation home, Elizabeth Fiddler put a sign in her living-room window: “CAT INSIDE. His name is Louie!”

She took a photo of the sign, with Louie, a black and white cat wearing an orange bow tie with a bell attached, sitting below, and posted it to a Facebook group called “Sandy Lake Fire 2025 – Pet Rescue.”

Joy Fiddler sat outside a hotel smoking a cigarette, as her daughter, Saffron, registered their family of nine with the Canadian Red Cross. Fleeing from an out-of-control wildfire near her Northern Ontario home in Sandy Lake First Nation, she had slept for less than an hour after arriving more than 1,500 kilometres away in Cornwall.

“All I saw was orange,” Ms. Fiddler, 51, said Monday afternoon, recalling her 11-hour wait at the Sandy Lake airport, where military aircraft and helicopters have been landing since Saturday, struggling to airlift nearly 3,000 people amid heavy smoke.