Many years ago, we adopted a beautiful Calico cat.

She was found as a baby kitten on a busy highway in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic. Some kind person snatched her up and brought her to our veterinarian. The kitten tested positive for FIV and was quarantined from the rest of the animals.

When our dear cat became ill,

she needed to stay at the vets for overnight observation. When we went to visit our cat, we saw the kitten in her cage with the quarantine sign. We were told by the veterinarian that there was a very good chance the kitten would not be FIV+ in another month because many feral kittens are born with FIV but it goes away on its own. Meanwhile, our cat was not improving and we continued to visit her at the vets while she was under 24 hour observation. Every time we went to her cage, the kitten would reach through her cage and paw at us. Before long, we were falling in love with the little kitten. We seemed to develop a bond. On our last visit to pick up our cat, we decided to adopt the kitten.

Unfortunately, she did not get rid of the virus on her own and remained FIV+ with many different problems throughout her life. Our bond had grown so tight over the years that when her battle was over, the grief was so bad that we swore we'd never have another pet.

Just days later, while suffering unbelievable grief, we heard a terrible screeching sound from the front of the house. We quickly went to see what it was. When we opened the door, we saw a fox standing in the middle of the lawn and a cat ran inside the house.

The cat seemed wild to us and we were a bit afraid of it. She stayed behind our TV for hours. When she finally came out, she was frantic to get out of the house and back outside. She seemed very scared and at first we thought it was because we turned the TV on and it seemed like she didn't know what that was. We let her out and thought we'd never see her again.

At about 2 a.m. we heard what sounded like howl's coming from the back of the house. We got up and went out to investigate. When we opened the deck door, the same cat ran in. She looked and felt very skinny. We fed her some of the cat food we still had in the house and sent her on her way. In the following days, she would continuously be chased by both foxes and coyotes back to our house. Over the following weeks, she would kill small animals and bring them back to the house and eat them on our outside deck. It appeared as if she had been living under our deck for some time. At this point, we became convinced that she was a wild or abandoned cat and we started keeping her inside the house at night.

We had never seen or heard of a Bengal Cat before and she didn't look like any cat we'd ever seen. Her feet were too big,
her chest was quite wide, and her meow's were more like howls. We brought her to the vet to have her checked out and to see if she might have a chip. Though we thought she might be wild or abandoned, we couldn't believe that she didn't appear to have any fleas or tics and that didn't seem possible. The vet said, no fleas, no tics, no chip; you're the proud new owners. Over the next couple of weeks, she was helping us to heal from the horrible pain of losing our precious calico cat and we were head over heals in love with our new Bengal cat.

Then she showed up one day with a collar on her neck. We couldn't believe it. She belonged to someone and they must have been so worried about her. We took the collar off and saw that there was a phone number on the collar. We called the number and told them of our story. It turned out that she lived only 5 houses up the street. She had left home because they brought another cat into the house that she didn't like for some reason. To make what has already turned out to be a very long story a little bit shorter, they decided to let us keep her. Once you know this cat, you know that she does her own thing and she wasn't gonna stop coming back and making her presence known. To help her adjust to a new life indoors, we chopped down some trees and brought them into our porch where we created an outdoor environment within the safety of our closed in porch, and she lived happily ever after.