In the summer vacation, I visited Grandpa in the countryside. There was a black cat in Grandpa’s house. It was so black that it was reminiscent of evil creatures in horror stories. At night its eyes seemed to shine in the dark. Although I am a cat lover, the very sight of it still gave me goose pimples.

On the visit to my surprise I found the black cat crippled. One of its legs was broken.

When my sister and I were admiring the cat, Grandad said that the black cat had borne a litter of three kittens. The baby cats were nestling in a cardboard box upstairs. My sister urged me to take her to check the kittens out. The stairs in Grandad’s house were a bit steep. But my sister’s desire to see the kittens was such that I had no choice but to satisfy her curiosity right away.

It was a love-at-first-sight experience. One of the kittens had golden eyes and pure white fur. It was the most beautiful, but we found it was the shyest. The other two were black and white. Plain as they looked, they appealed to us no less than the white one. My sister begged Grandad to bring the kittens downstairs so that we could play with them there.

At first the kittens were all timid. If we maintained eye contact with them, they would shy away and huddle up together. Gradually they got used to our presence, but the white one was still a bit on guard. We put all three in a paper box. They tried to climb over the edges. They were so little that the barrier seemed like a mountain to them. They did not give up, however. They tried again and again. Finally, one of them made it over the top. Just at the moment, the mother cat found her children missing. Meowing, she came over to us and found her kittens playing with us. She picked up the children one by one with her mouth and carried them back to their home, the cardboard box upstairs.

Although injured in the leg, the mother cat still took all the trouble to make three round trips to carry her kittens in her mouth back to their nest. So much awed were we by her labour of love that our eyes followed her as she was making the trip upstairs.