A lady heard weeping coming from her garden on Valentine’s Day. She came upon an orange tabby standing in the snow, looking a little disheveled.
The cat pawed at her door, meowing for assistance.
The lady, a foster volunteer with Un Chat à la Fois, a Quebec kitten rescue, messaged Marie Simard with a photo of the cat. “She stated she knew we didn’t take adult cats and was seeking for a way to rescue him,” Simard, creator of Un Chat à la Fois, told The Dodo. “It broke my heart as soon as I saw the photo, and I advised her to take him to our partner facility so he could be checked.”
“His expression stated all that needed to be said,” she said. “He lingered in front of her door for a while, and when I instructed her to get him, he didn’t try to flee.”
The vet determined that the cat did, in fact, require assistance when he arrived at the clinic. He had bite wounds, fleas, and ticks on him, as well as frostbite, decaying teeth, and diabetes. Simard understood that if the stray hadn’t sought for the care he so desperately needed, he wouldn’t have survived another harsh winter.
Despite his frailty, the cat was just happy to be among people again. “He was quite friendly to the clinic personnel,” Simard recalled. “At the vet, he’d take his paw out of the cage so others could pat him.”
Simard called the cat Aslan after the lion from “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Aslan’s health improved after a few days of therapy at the clinic, and he was placed in a foster home, where he soon made friends with his new mom’s cats.
Every day, Aslan made his foster mom aware of how grateful he was to be secure and comfortable.
Simard described him as “a really loving cat.” “He like to sleep near his foster mother.”
When it came time to find Aslan a permanent home, his foster mom couldn’t bear the thought of separating him from his new sister, Cleo, a fellow rescue cat. “He’d simply lay next to her, groom her, and she’d groom him,” Simard explained. “It made reasonable to keep them together – two rescue cats who had had a difficult existence.”
After a year, Aslan has proven to be the finest valentine his family could have wished for.
