I grew up on a farm outside of a small town in rural Canada. I tell you this only because I have seen some disgusting things, growing up on a farm you learn pretty early about death. Watching my dad butcher pigs made me kind of insensitive about dead animals from an early age. It's something that I still struggle with to this day. They're just animals I always think, what does it matter.

Anyway, there was a summer when I was a child when we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cats just roaming our yards and the barns. Some of these cats were strays, others were the kittens of mousers, some of them... just appeared one day.

I remember in particular this very large cat, it was about the size of a baby deer, maybe a bit smaller. Either way, it was huge, with spots on its fur, a small tail and tufted ears and it did not like people.

For some reason, I couldn't accept the fact that this cat did not want to be friends with me. All the other cats were perfectly fine if I came right up to them and picked them up, but this one would hiss, growl and run away from me every single time.

That summer, I made it my mission to make that cat love me. So I started by finding out where it usually slept. There was a huge tree that had been struck by lightning and fell a few years back, and that was usually where the cat decided to sleep.

I started by bringing it some food and some water and just waiting. I would wait an hour or two to see if he would come out and eat, but he rarely did. I would leave the food there and return the next day, and it was always empty. As the days went by I kept trying, and eventually the cat came to eat the food while I was there.

This went on for a few weeks, me placing the food further and further away from the log, the cat slowly getting closer and closer to me. One day I put the food right beside me, and the cat slowly came up and started eating. While it was eating I very, very slowly put my hand closer and started petting it. The moment my hand touched his fur, he bristled, growled and took a swipe at me.

I don't remember much else, but when I woke up in the emergency room my father told me that they had found me on the ground, bleeding to death with the cat lapping up my blood. He grabbed my body, kicked the cat so hard it went flying into a tree and ran off, and they rushed me to the nearest hospital.

I had lost so much blood that when I was admitted I showed no signs of life, I wasn't breathing and my heart was not beating.

The doctors did everything they could, including giving me an IV and hooking me up to some machines to make me breathe. Thankfully, they were able to revive me and I was in a coma for a few weeks afterwards.

They told me that the cat had cut through my neck and nicked my jugular, just enough that any longer and I would have been a goner.

My dad told me that when he went back home after I was stable for a few days, he hunted down the cat and shot it. He said it was sitting by where he found me, looked him straight in the eyes and didn't even try to run as he approached.

I felt very guilty afterwards, I was the one responsible for it dying, I pushed it too hard and it acted just like any wild animal would.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I went back home after that and promptly forgot all about the cat. My dad, who had never allowed us to have any cats in the house, brought me a kitten after I got out of the hospital and let me keep him.

It was shortly after that that I started to have very strange dreams. Dreams of a growling, snarling animal outside my window, just waiting for me to go outside.

I woke up once to a dream that felt so real. I dreamed that I could see myself sleeping from outside the window with the kitten sleeping on my chest, and in a fit of jealous rage, I clawed the wall, tearing a huge chunk away from the linoleum siding.

I woke up and immediately looked outside the window, but there was nothing there. The next day I saw my dad replacing some of the siding, but didn't think anything of it. We have lots of bears and wild animals around, and from time to time they sharpen their claws on our house or the trees, so it's a common occurrence.

These dreams continued for a few weeks, seeing myself sleep from outside the window, but they happened so often that they didn't even concern me. Sometimes I would dream of going and hunting deer, badgers or foxes, even weasels, but I figured it was just because I had a new kitten on my bed.

I didn't think anything of it, until the kitten got out of the house one night. I didn't sleep well that night, but when I finally did get to sleep, I didn't have any dreams either.

I went out to look for my kitten the next day, and found its tiny mangled body right in front of our patio door. I was sad, but like I said, growing up on a farm you learn to accept that.

After that though the dreams went away and strange things started happening to our cats. It was getting to be winter, and we started finding dead cats in strange places. We found some of them in the exhaust pipes from our barn and house, with no obvious marks on them, so we just figured they curled up to get some warmth, fell down and couldn't get out. It did happen a lot when it got closer to winter, so no one thought anything of it. We also found a lot of them curled by the engines of our cars, and they would die every time we started them.

The thing I found strange though, was every time I pet a cat and fed it, that was the next one we found dead. I thought I was crazy for the first dozen, but after that I just stopped trying to keep them alive, and then they stopped dying.

After I made that decision, I started seeing a pair of glowing red eyes outside my window during the night. Any time I would get closer, they would vanish, but they were always there. Once I set up a camera outside the window, but when I went to check it the next day, it had been completely destroyed.

This became my life for some time, and I just got used to it. As I got older, I started to see the red eyes as some sort of protector. When a rabid dog came charging at me, I saw a shape fly in front of me and attack the dog. It was only there for a second, but the next thing I knew, the dog was dead, bleeding out from a claw to the neck. So I thought that whatever it was, it was there just to protect me.

This is getting kinda long, and I need to get to work, so I'll post some more of my tale tomorrow.

Part 2