Felix Takes A Holiday

One day last week our cat Davie started acting strangely.

He looked as if he was keeping guard and refused to move out of the way, so I looked into the room more closely and found the reason for his behaviour. There, stretched out asleep on one of our chairs, was a gorgeous marmalade cat.

As I got closer, our visitor woke up and raised his head, but he didn't move off the chair.

"How did HE get in? You haven't left the back door open again have you?" My wife sounded annoyed, so I pretended I hadn't heard her and talked straight to Davie, lying on the floor nearby.

"It's O.K. Davie, he's not going to attack you. Let's see if he has a tag on his collar".

Sure enough, he had. He allowed me to pick him up and examine his collar tag. On the front it gave his name, "FELIX", and the back a telephone number. Also, his collar had an entry magnet, just like the one our Davie wears. This explained how he had got into our house, unannounced.

So I tried phoning the number on his tag but there was no answer, even though I let it ring a long time.
I gave up and tried to feed the cat with our cat's biscuits, but he wasn't interested.

I tried other food, but again he was not interested.

"I'll ring his number again tomorrow morning" I said to my wife. "As he's nice and clean, he can stay if he wants to until tomorrow"

And that's just what he did. He was tidy and quiet and spent most of the night asleep, snuggled in a couple of old pillows on the old chest at the foot of the bed. You would hardly have known he was there!

The following day I tried his number several times, but still no answer. Then my wife had a bright idea, "If he's local, perhaps he's registered with the local 'vet. Let's phone them and see," she suggested.

Sure enough, they recognized him and said he lived in the neighbourhood. "His folks must be away on holiday," they said, but we're sorry we can't give you the address, it's against the rules".

"I'm sorry too" I said, "perhaps you could you tell them that their cat is at my house and needs to be collected? Meanwhile, we'll carry on looking after him."

At teatime we got a phone call. It was a young man, who said the cat was his. He had been away on holiday for a couple of days with his parents. They were coming back late that evening, but he had come back early to make sure his cat was all right.".

When he came round, we showed him the cat, still sleeping. "Yes, that's Felix," he said. "He's got our telephone number on the other side of his tag.."

"Which is?" I asked, checking his story.

He was right, which proved he had a strong claim on the cat. As the young man had come visiting on his bicycle, without anything to carry the cat back, he had to borrow our cat basket and Felix got home that night.

We discovered a basket of flowers on our doorstep the following day, with a note saying "Thank you for looking after me while my parents were away in Spain!" signed FELIX, (and what looked like a paw print)!

I wonder if Felix will visit us again next year?