45ebf3c490593574dd454e5dfd5a5758

I looked up, and there he was: being carried away by one of those seagulls! It was Frank, and he’d snapped Dooley up in his claws and was soaring, his wings beating hard.

“Help me!” Dooley screamed.

“Scratch him, Dooley!” I yelled back. “Use your claws!”

Just then, Jack swept down on me, and dug his claws into my neck and tried to pick me up, same way his friend had picked up Dooley. Only I must have weighed too much, for he couldn’t lift me from the deck.

“Damn, you’re heavier than I thought, you big orange fatty!” said Jack.

“I’m blorange, you stupid bird!” I cried, and gave him a terrific swipe across the beak. “And I’m not fat—I’m big-boned!”

Immediately the vicious seagull backed off, and took flight again.

Meanwhile, Dooley had taken my advice, and was clawing for all he was worth. Frank cried out in pain when one of Dooley’s attempts hit a tender spot on his belly, and he promptly dropped my friend… straight into the ocean!

“Odelia, help!” I screamed, as I watched Dooley being dunked into the drink. Unlike me, he never learned how to swim, and I could see he was sinking like the proverbial stone the moment he hit the water. “Odelia!”

Odelia came running.“Where is he?” she asked. She must have seen what happened.

“Down there,” I said, pointing to where Dooley had gone in.

“I’ll get one of the crew members,” she said, and hurried off again.

This was going to take too long, I just knew it.

And so I did the only thing possible: I jumped in after my friend.

19

The water was surprisingly chilly. Still, I didn’t have a lot of time to think about this, for I had but one purpose in mind: to save my friend from drowning!

So I thrashed around a bit to get my bearings, then decided to take a dive and disappeared into the waves, for that’s where Dooley was presumably hanging out at this moment.

I remember he’d expounded on the fact that most animals naturally possess the capacity to stay afloat when thrown into a body of water, with as one exception the human being. Cats, however, should be able to swim when left to their own devices, and soon this theory proved correct, for the moment I resurfaced,I detected the bobbing head of my friend, only a few feet from where I myself was bobbing up and down, making heroic efforts to remember the lessons Fifi, our neighboring Yorkie, had taught me once upon a not so long ago.

“Dooley!” I bellowed.

“Max!” Dooley returned. “Look! I can swim!”

“Yes, you can!”

I made a concerted effort to join him posthaste, and soon we were bobbing up and down together, and glancing up at the Queen of the Seas, steaming ever onward without a care in the world, oblivious to the fact that two of its passengers had gone overboard.

“Man overboard!” suddenly a voice rang out some fifteen stories higher, and next thing we knew, a loud alarm blared.

“I think that’s us,” I told Dooley.

“Shouldn’t it be ‘cat overboard?’”

“Let’s not get too nitpicky. We should be glad they’re coming to pick us up at all.”

“Sure,” he said, then cast a grateful look in my direction. “Thanks for jumping in, Max. It’s much nicer to be in trouble together.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “You would have done the same.”

“Yes, I would” he agreed. “But still. It’s very noble of you.”

“You’re my best friend, Dooley. What else am I going to do when some horrible bird grabs you by the neck and throws you in the ocean?”

“Those birds are really horrible, aren’t they?”

“Extremely horrible,” I agreed. “Did you know the other one tried to pick me up, too?”

“And what did you do? Fight him off?”

“He couldn’t lift me. Said I was too heavy.”

“Maybe I should get as big as you, Max. That way no bird would be able to grab me.”

“That’s all right, Dooley. From now on we just need to be more vigilant, and make sure those seagulls don’t come anywhere near us again.”

“I clawed him right across the stomach. He squawked and then dropped me.”

“Good. He got exactly what he deserved.”

A small boat had been lowered into the water, and the big boat—the mother ship as it were—had stopped sailing onward. In fact it was turning back around. Big boats like the Queen of the Seas presumably can’t back up like a car can. The small boat was heading in our direction, and I saw that two men were occupying the little thing, as it sped ever closer, powered by a powerful engine, and causing the water to spray around in its wake.

“Here they come, Dooley,” I said. “Get ready to be saved.”

“It’s so nice that someone actually cares, Max,” said Dooley, who was getting a little emotional. “They could have simply decided not to bother and sailed on and left us here to—”

“Don’t you say it, Dooley,” I warned him.

“—swim on indefinitely.”

“Odelia would never allow that to happen. And neither would Chase. Those two love us very much, and they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they’d allowed us to… swim on indefinitely.”

The boat had finally reached us, and the two men looked a little surprised.

“Cats?” asked one of the men, who was wearing a bright orange life jacket. “They stopped the boat to save a couple of cats?”