Yesterday was World Cat Day (as observed in Poland), so I thought this might be the perfect time to tell you a little cat story.
More than two years ago, I posted the story of Rocket, a kitten that I found in my neighborhood — now a big, happy cat living with my parents. This story has a very similar beginning.
It was a cold September evening, I was walking home along a busy street, when I heard a kitten squeak. It was obviously coming from under a car parked near the street, so I started looking, but couldn’t see any kitten under the car. The squeaking continued, so I knew it must have been there, and I kept looking and reaching behind the wheels, but to no avail.
Since many people were passing by, my unusual activities attracted the attention of some of them. One man with an “excuse me sir, what are you doing?” look approached me, but before he even asked me a question, the kitten meowed again, so the man began searching with me.
After we both searched for a while with no success, the guy said “you know what, I live in this block here and I know the owner of this car, let me call him”. In a few minutes, the owner came and joined the search operation.
He looked inside the car just to be sure the kitten didn’t get in there in some miraculous way, but that was not the case. It was obvious that the little guy was somewhere in the car undercarriage, but the meowing seemed to be coming from different places and neither one of us was able to tell exactly where the kitten could be.
In the end, we lifted the car up with a jack, the owner crawled under it and saw some fur sticking out from a hollow spot next to the exhaust pipe. He reached in there and got the kitten out — the poor thing looked all dirty and miserable, but didn’t appear to be hurt in any way. The first guy called his wife, who brought some cat food (it turned out they had two Persian cats) and water for the rescuee.
I then took the little fellow home to take care of him. It was apparent that he wasn’t accustomed to humans and was afraid of them, because the moment he got out of the box in which I brought him, he got really frightened, started hissing at me, and tried to attack me if I got too close. But then my adult cats came to see what was going on, and the little one got much more comfortable around them.
The kitten was named “Opel” after the brand of the car (all of the search party agreed on that). I originally planned to keep him just for a week or two and find him a new home, but since he was getting along quite well with my two adult cats, I thought, what the hell, he can stay with me. So that’s how my cat crew got its newest member.
In addition to that, I made some new friends. The married couple who helped me with the search operation turned out to be really nice people, and now I visit them every once in a while to talk about how Opel is doing and share other cat stories.
Now, since you’ve made it that far in the story, let me reward you with some photos. Here’s Opel literally minutes after I brought him home (sorry, the image quality is as poor as he was that very moment):
And later that same night, feeling much more comfortable and hanging out with one of the older cats:
They became buddies pretty quickly:
To the point that sometimes Opel was literally sleeping on his big fellow:
And sometimes it was the other way around:
They were often getting really creative with their sleeping poses on that chair:
And here’s a later photo of Opel, just chilling on an old CRT monitor:
