Tails From Oakland, or a very exciting 15 minutes

I was working in the garden when I noticed that my neighbor was having trouble starting his car. I called across the street to him asking did he need help as he opened the hood of his

car. He lifted the hood and jumped back wards, then he grimaced and pulled a bleeding cat from the inside of his engine compartment!
He looked at me and said, "I think I found the problem." He laid the cat on the ground and asked me if I knew who the cat belonged to.
I didn't, but I noticed it was still breathing and told him," I haven't got anything to do right now, you go to work and I'll take care of the cat"

I looked at the cats injuries as my neighbor drove away, there was a lot of blood, the fan blade of the engine had scalped the cat, one ear was dangling.
It had lost a lot of blood and was unconscious.
I took it home and held a towel onto the wounds to stop the bleeding. My dog thought of cats as meat with feet, and because I had my hands full I decided to sit on the porch and lock

the dog in the house while I kept pressure on the wounds. I told my son to walk around to the neighbor's houses and ask if they were missing a cat.

As I was sitting on the steps, a flock of tiny little birds, must have been 100 of them, landed in the Camellia tree next to the steps. The cat started to wake up and began to squirm in my

arms. The birds were chirping loudly as they bounced from branch to branch, the dog was barking furiously at the cat in my arms .  I started having trouble holding the cat down as he

began to fight my hand holding the towel on his head and then something spooked the birds and they flew right at my head!
I was wearing a loosely knit sweater and the next thing I know 2 of the birds have their feet caught up in the threads of my sweater!
Now this bleeding and scalped cat is trying to attack the birds that are trapped in the fabric, the birds are flapping furiously trying to get away,  my dog manages to push open the screen

door and burst out onto the porch and I'm screaming like my feet are on fire.
I tried to ball up over the cat to keep the dog off of him, but if I did that the birds would be squished, and the birds wings were beating the crap out of my chin and chest, I  had to stand

up and run around the porch to get away from my dog.
About this time a police car pulled up to the front of my house, somebody had called in a "woman screaming"  report and they had come from only a block away.
The two policemen get out of the car and run up to the porch where I was still running away from the dog, and they both bust out laughing!
One of them grabbed the dogs collar, while the other one tried to disengage the poor birds from my sweater.
Then my 10 year old son came running up with a neighbor lady who claimed the cat and left in a hurry to get it to the vet.
The cat by the way made a nearly complete recovery but he lost an eye and one ear always drooped.