Michael is faced with the difficult choice of keeping Tabor or returning her to her rightful owner-and, once again, facing the streets alone. When Michael takes Tabor to a veterinarian in Montana, he discovers that Tabor has an identification chip and an owner in Portland who has never given up hope of finding his beloved cat. As they make their way along the West Coast, the pair be inseparable, healing the scars of each others troubled pasts.

Tabor comforts Michael when hes down, giving him someone to love and care for, and inspiring him to get sober and to come to terms with his past family traumas and grief over the death of his life partner. Along the way, people are drawn to the spirited, beautiful cat and are moved to help Michael, who cuts a striking figure with Tabor riding high on his backpack or walking on a leash. When winter comes, they travel from Oregon to the beaches of California to the high plains of Montana, surviving blizzards, bears, angry steers, and rainstorms. He names her Tabor, nurses her back to health, and she bes something of a celebrity in Southeast Portland. One raining night, he stumbles upon a hurt, starving, scruffy cat cowering beneath a caf table and takes her in. Alcoholic and depressed, Michael King lives on the streets of Portland, Oregon, and sleeps in a UPS loading bay. Book Synopsis For fans of A Street Cat Named Bob and Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, this lovely, luminous story will warm your heart and make you laugh and want to share your life with a rescue cat (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats).

Soul of a Lion by Barbara Bennett