If you interpret them as Unicode characters, they are:

ߔ U+07D4 NKO LETTER PA

ꀀ U+A000 YI SYLLABLE IT

N'Ko is a writing system from West Africa, while the Yi script is the writing system of the Yi (Lo-lo) people from China, Vietnam and Thailand.

Of course, that's not what the original sender meant.

1. Most likely, he or she picked these characters because of their appearance. In fact, ꀀ kinda looks like a cat's head, with ߔ being its paw.

2. Another possibility is that the sender used a legacy encoding to write its SMS, and that your phone was unable to figure it out. This is a very likely case if the sender is from a multi-alphabet country such as India.