Best Friends

Marv couldn’t explain why it happened, only how it happened. One cold morning last spring, he’d been in the barn, milking a few heifers so he could feed an early calf whose mother rejected him. He noticed this naked little cat watching him intently and shot a squirt of milk at it. The cat sputtered and yowled then began cleaning itself, glaring at him as he chuckled and went back to his milking. When he was finished with his core, Marv realized that the cat was still there and was no longer glaring at him. In fact, the cat seemed to have an interested, almost calculating look on its face. This was silly, of course— cat don’t have human thoughts so they didn’t really have human emotions or get ideas, no matter how much it seemed like they did. He’d shrugged it off and turned way so he could feed the motherless calf.

The next day, the skinny little bald cat was back. This time it was waiting for him with a dead mouse at its feet. Marv stared dumbfounded as the cat batted the mouse to him then opened its mouth expectantly. Bemused, Marv shot the cat a drink or two and thought about how he’d dismissed the thought that the cat was planning something. Maybe someone had trained the little hairless cat to perform the trick. That was certainly more plausible than the cat thinking up a plan to come up with more milk, right?

Flash forward nine months. He now had a barn free of rodents, a yearling calf that no longer needed to be bottle fed, yet here he was still coming out to milk that damn cow every morning, just for the easy company of a scrawny hairless cat. Of course, he now came out with two cups of coffee. He still shot the little cat a squirt of milk in the mouth, but most of the milk went into its coffee cup.

No, he couldn’t explain how his best friend had become a cat and frankly, he didn’t care.