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I've had cats on and off throughout my life, but the two I had when I first started dating my husband had died by the time we married. We moved to a house on private land on a peninsula inside Daniel Boone National Forest soon after we married, and we began accumulating dogs. One was a foster I couldn't let go and the others were abandoned in the woods. My husband said he didn't like cats, and our dogs fulfilled the need for pets anyway, so we remained catless for several years.

One day, my husband came home and said there was an adult cat lying alongside the road at the end of the neighbor's lane, apparently having been hit by a car. I put some canned fish in a plastic container with a lid and walked up there.

The blue-eyed gray and white cat had not been hit, but he had been abandoned and out on his own for so long that he was weak and about to give up. Cars occasionally passed on the way to the campground at the end of the peninsula, and he wouldn't even move. When he saw me walking toward him, though, he jumped up and ran into the weeds.

I sat down on the ground and opened the plastic container. It took a few seconds for the smell of the fish to hit him, but then his head popped up and he meowed. He came out and gobbled down the food. I stood up when he was finished and coaxed him to follow me, but he meowed so pitifully, I decided to try carrying him. Since he didn't know me and had been in the wild for a while, I fully expected to be scratched and bitten. But he was smarter than that—thanks to me bringing him a meal!

He struggled a couple of times and I'd set him down, but he was too weak to follow me, so I'd pick him up again. We made it back to the house. I took him to the vet the next day, and they said he was so underweight he probably wouldn't have lasted much longer. I named him Macavity (one of the cats in T.S. Eliott's book "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" and the book on which the Broadway musical "Cats" was based). It's my favorite tomcat name, and he was the second Macavity I've had.

He soon whipped the dogs into shape, and two years later, when someone abandoned a black male kitten (Bojangles) near our lane, he helped raise him. Unfortunately, we only had Mac four years before he died of cancer. We then adopted an adult brown and white female cat (Lucy) from a shelter so Bo would have a feline friend.

And my husband, the man who doesn't like cats? Bo and Lucy (especially Lucy) have him wrapped around their little paws! And we have Macavity to thank for making him see the light!

Story submitted by Laurel Heidtman.

This story was originally shared on The Animal Rescue Site. Share your very own rescue story here!