Car-Crazy Cat (Animal Story 5)

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My husband comes from the Italian island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. His family lives in a village in the mountains. We’ve helped lots of German friends find accommodation with the locals, either in houses in the vineyards between the village and the sea or directly in the village. Once, I went to the beach by car with a woman who stayed in the village. Her car was parked on a noisy piazza. When we got in, we didn’t hear anything, but on the way down the extremely curvy road, we noticed strange noises coming from the engine. They didn’t sound ‘technical’, though, and came at irregular intervals. When we parked in front of a supermarket near the beach where we wanted to buy some goods, the noises became more distinct. They now sounded like animal noises. But how was that possible? Emancipated women that we were we started looking around for a man and soon found a heroic looking one who dared open the hood for us. And what did he find? A small cat peeping fearfully out from its hiding-place between the hot and stinking tubes! It had obviously slipped into the car when it was parked in the village and then gone with us for half an hour down the road to the beach. We bought some milk, fed it and then drove on to the beach proper where our friends were waiting for us. When the children saw me holding the cat, they all went mad. They wanted to hold it, to keep it, to adopt it on the spot and take it back to Germany with them. That was a hard situation for the parents! The first tears were appearing when the cat suddenly jumped from my arm, ran away to a car nearby and disappeared under the hood! No coaxing made it come out again. What now? We asked around, but nobody knew who the car belonged to. We wished the cat well and wanted to do something for it, but what? In the end, someone had the idea to write a note for the car driver. We wrote “Attention please, there’s a cat in your engine” on a piece of cardboard which we put under a windscreen wiper. Can you imagine the car driver’s reaction? I’m sure he thought someone had had too much sun and had lost their marbles. --- If you're interested in more animal stories, click on the green box above the title. --- photo: pixabay