Story of the fishing cat

Along time ago, a friend who lived on a farm said that the best pet one could ever have was a fishing cat. All right, so we all collect a lot of friends in our lifetimes and, so, have to put up with a lot of their foibles… but a fishing cat? What the hell is a fishing cat? As if in answer to these questions, the friend wanted to know if he could send a fishing kitten over that he had recently acquired.

Since no one says no to something like that, the little feline was delivered the next morning stuffed in an empty whisky-bottle carton. The daughter was delighted because when she pulled him out of it, he was only about six inches long but had bluish grey iridescent fur —the kind peacocks and some ravens have.

Also, when she gave him milk in a saucer, instead of lapping it up, he splashed it around — looking for fish inside maybe? But K3, as he came to be called, had one more habit that was far more disconcerting: he loved chasing crows that came to roost on the window ledges. He would wait patiently for one of them to come and then lunge out to see if he could grab it.

On the eighth floor of a multi-storey building, however, this can be a dangerous pastime — especially if you’re still not a full-grown cat that knows how to land on its feet. And K3 didn’t.

He died instantly on the cement downstairs. It was a small dugout grave where the daughter insisted on taking her dad to pray. Since he doesn’t, he heard her instead. “Please God,” she said, “let him have lots of catfish to catch in his next life and forget about crows.” Some prayers can be so simple.