Tabby

One day, as I was getting ready to go hunting, Dad trumped in carrying a bread-box sized container with holes in it. After talking to Mom, he tracked me down without the box, but with one hand behind his back. "Brought you something, Dy," which sparked me doing the ten-year-old-on-Christmas routine (well, because I was ten, and this was sort of the Island’s equivalent to Christmas). "OOOOHHH!! WHATWHATWHATWHATWHAT?!?!?"

He drew his hand from behind his back; in his palm there sat a purplish panther kitten grooming herself. We didn’t really have panthers on the island, so it took him a while to get explanations out of the way. After that, I took her hunting - I figured she’d be hungry.


A couple months after that, I woke up to Tabby chewing on one of my fingers. "Taaabs. I’m trying to sleep."

She blinked at me in that feline like-I-care sorta way. "And I’m hungry." Figuring I was still half dreaming or something, I rolled back over to go to sleep. A rather insistent Tabby-voice interrupted my attempts to rejoin Morpheus. "Hey, hey, hey. I’m still hungry!!" This convinced me I was not asleep. After trying to puzzle out 1) How the feline could use words when all the other animals I’d encountered lacked such abilities, and 2) how she managed to do it without moving her lips (I couldn’t figure either out) I got up. By the time I’d managed to fully dress, Tabby’d started running circles around my feet chanting "food food food food food..." Things have never been quite normal since...