A Couple Rescued A Lost Kitten Whose Fur Started To Change Color

When Kathryn van Beek spotted a tiny kitten searching for its mother, she never could have guessed the bizarre turn things would take. In the weeks following this well-timed rescue, the orphaned kitten's fur began to turn patchy and dark. Now, as Van Beek watched him growing, there was no mistaking it: his gray fur was changing color before her very eyes.

Clinging to life

Bruce the cat has become quite the popular kitty, but that wasn’t always the case. In fact, on November 3, 2015, he was found utterly bedraggled and clinging to life in his hometown of Auckland, New Zealand. Thankfully, though, Bruce's fate was turned around when a woman called Kathryn van Beek found and rescued the tiny kitten.

Rainy day

Lucky as he was, Bruce came frighteningly close to missing out on such a cushy rescue. You see, the day he was discovered was a seriously wet one. And it's a small miracle that van Beek managed to see him at all through the torrential rainfall. At first glance, she even thought the tiny gray creature was a mouse or a rat.

Sudden realization

When she got closer, though, she realized that what she'd taken for a rodent was actually a newborn kitten. “He wasn’t meowing when I found him,” van Beek told Love Meow on January 4, 2016. “But he was crawling slowly along on his tummy.”

Just born

“[It was] as though he was trying to find his mother, poor little mite,” she recounted. And to make matters worse, the kitten couldn’t have been very old, as van Beek informed News Now. “His eyes were still closed, and he still had his umbilical cord attached.”