The Uninvited Playmate
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Life Lessons from the Cat
By Andrea Arthur Owan

Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly.
~Andre Norton

It was finally spring, after a long, hard winter. Our three dogs galloped around the house acting delirious. And when our normally taciturn gray tabby, Sergeant Tibbs, scaled the couch, zoomed across the top of it and launched himself, flying-squirrel style, onto the back of our unsuspecting sixty-five-pound black Labrador dog, I knew it wouldn't be fair to sequester him in the house any longer. I worried about letting him outside, but our vet gave us the thumbs up. "You can't fight how God's designed him," she said. "When he's going nuts like that, you've got to indulge the poor guy once in a while."

The following morning, I slid open the patio door and called to Tibbs, who was in some secret location in the house going through his post-breakfast grooming ritual. Within seconds, he appeared like Houdini, slid across the kitchen floor and tore into the family room. But he screeched to a halt midway into the room. He eyeballed the open door and big, beckoning outdoors, and then gave me a this-is-too-good-to-be-true, so-what's-the-catch look. (Keep reading)