It was during a particularly cold snap between Christmas and New Years when Lou the Cat entered my life.

I always take off the holiday weeks, to spend more time with both my family and myself. My wife was working through the holiday, and my daughters were back from college, but by 10:00am had bolted the premises for malls and coffee shops unknown. I save on my heating bills by the judicious use of three Franklin stoves located through-out the house; so when the girls hit the road, I went out to the backyard to assemble firewood for the coming days.

And there, atop the woodpile, clearly waiting for somebody in charge, sat a VERY big cat.

He was an orange and white marmalade, a fifteen to twenty pound bruiser of a feline, all muscle, whip-cord, and whalebone. I could tell he wasn't a stray, as he was more than healthy, clean, and well-groomed, with a collar and some kind of tag dangling from it. He wasn't a bit shy, either, allowing me to pet him and examine the tag without objection.

"LOU", it said, and nothing else.

It was late December, a particularly cold and nasty winter in my area, what W. C. Fields was talking about when he said "Twern't a fit night out fer man ner beast". Lou put up a brave front, but as I pet him I could tell he was shivering in the cold. So after loading up some wood in the carrier, I invited him into the house, and he gratefully entered.

I've been told more than once that you shouldn't feed a cat milk; but I've never met one yet that turned the stuff down either, so I poured Lou a saucer and finished restocking the fire-wood. By the time I was done he'd lapped the bowl clean, so I opened a small can of tuna-fish. While I was break it up a bit in a dish on the kitchen counter, he leaped right up and began to dig in.

"Don't make a habit of that kind of behavior, hoss," I told him, stroking him from head to tail as he chowed down, clearly famished.

At that point, I had no intention of keeping Lou. I just wanted to figure out who owned him, get him home, and give said owner a stern lecture about the damages of turning out a house-pet in this kind of weather.

When we came down that Saturday morning, Lou was sitting by the sink, staring intently out into the backyard.

"What you lookin' at, Kitty Kat?" M'Lady asked. She crained her neck a little. "Somethin' running around back there?"

"Woop!" she said, then stepped over and opened the screen-door. "Get 'em, baby!"

Lou bounded to the edge of the kitchen counter, down to the floor and to the porch outside in three easy leaps. "That's it! Teach 'em not to mess with Momma's garden!"

"Damn! Like something out of Wild Kingdom!"