A lost, injured cat named Mata Hairi was rescued by a homeless man one rainy night in Portland, Oregon.
Michael King, who has been a hitchhiker since 2003, found the cat, hurt and scared, taking refuge from the pouring rain under a cafe table.
Nursing her back to health, he names her Tabor and she becomes a bit of a celebrity in southeast Portland. King and Tabor hung around the streets of Portland for another three months until winter came. He listed her on Craigslist’s lost-and-found pet bulletin board, but when no one reclaimed her he took off with her for warmer climes.
“I see cats all the time,” he later told the Independent Record of Helena, “The last in the world that I wanted was a cat, especially a full-grown one... Something told me to grab her.”
They hitchhiked from Oregon to the beaches of California to the high plains of Montana, surviving blizzards and bears, angry steers and rainstorms. After traveling together for 10 months over thousands of miles across the American West, he arrived at his foster father’s home in Montana, where they took Tabor to the vet and found she had a microchip. Michael makes the difficult choice to return to Portland and reunite Tabor with her heartbroken owner Ron Buss who never stopped looking for her, and littermate Creto who waited mournfully for her on the porch every night.
“I didn’t want a cat in the first place. I just thought I was saving someone’s cat. And that’s what I’ve done. My pack is 20 pounds lighter, but she’s left a big, big hole.”
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