The Cat who Walked through Doors

The two cats had lived in the yard all their lives, three years at the time of the incident.

Except for two weeks after we caught them when they were about six months, got them spayed and neutered and had them recover in the house, their life had been outside.
They came and said hello, accepted a few minutes of lap time when we were in the yard but that was about the extent of the interaction.

The male, Eenie, was quiet and more solitary than the smaller black female, Mo.  So, Eenie was nicknamed The Cowboy cat. He did, however, spend many hot summer days at the bathroom window. Eenie was lying on the outside window sill, his brother Tigger, whom we had kept inside after the recovery from the trip to the SPCA would be on the inside window sill.
Separated by the fly screen, the two would sleep there back to back, or they would chat. There is no good other way to describe the conversation, the exchange of soft, short phrases, in a back and forth so oddly flowing like a human conversation that we used to stand in the bathroom door to listen in.
After the first year, Eenie started limping, Mo told us that something was wrong with him. Which we did not understand, of course, because he was just sitting still in the sun. A few days after she started acting strangely, he moved. The limp was obvious, so he got picked up, spirited to the vet, and the problem with his femur was fixed. After two weeks in the bathroom, we let him out, and all returned to normal.

So, for a continuous period of two years, Eenie had been outside, with Mo for total of four years.

Then Mo disappeared.

A week later, she is in the yard, meowing pitifully, sitting on her hind legs, unable to use her front legs.

Long story short, she ends up in a cage with both front paws out of commission. Bandaged, sedated daily, she started healing.

Eenie was his usual self, coming to say hi, busy evading racoons and possums, hunting a mouse when one showed up.

One night, after a few minutes of time with Eeenie, the blogster got up to go into the house.

This was the signal for Eenie to head in the opposite direction into the yard.

But he did not.

He walked to the door with the human.

As the human reached for the door knob, Eenie looked up and uttered a brief, questioning meow.

You want to go in?

Meow.

Okay.

The human opened the door, the cat walked in.

Surprised, the human followed. Eenie was sitting right next to the small cage of his sister, their noses touching, small sounds bouncing back and forth between them.

Fascinated, we silently watched.

After a few minutes, Eenie turned to the humans, then turned around and walked to the door. The blogster got up, opened the door for the cat, and the cat left with a tiny "thank you" meow (aka. the rolled R meow).

The strangeness of it all was reinforced the subsequent day, and - in fact - for as long as Mo needed to stay confined.

Once a day, her brother came in, went straight to the cage to check in on her, turned around and went outside. One night, it rained, he stayed until the rain stopped. Then he started hanging out with the two house cats. After a couple of weeks, he'd stay to watch TV if something interesting was running on the Discovery Channel.