You may or may not know this about me, but I have a soft spot that is actually larger than my entire body for cats. And a soft spot only slightly smaller for dogs. If there is a dog or a cat looking sad or sounding pitiful, I will be there, and I will quite likely be sniffling a little bit myself. This sometimes gets me into… well, not trouble exactly. But into awkward spots.
Thankfully, my friends know this about me and put up with it. Such as when my best friend, after driving up to Denver to visit, ended up sitting with me for hours at an animal shelter on July 5th so I could hand over a little lost dog that I’d found.
Tonight was another example. Isaac had just dropped me off and I was fumbling for my keys when I heard a pathetic mewing. It took me a while to locate the source, which involved a sad little game of Marco Polo where I wandered around the grassy area of my complex and meowed, then listened for the kitty to meow back. Then I had to go in my house and locate a flashlight. Then I had to look around some more. I eventually found a cat a little more than halfway up one of the pine trees near my house.
Common wisdom says that if a cat gets itself up a tree, it eventually will get itself back down. Common wisdom can hang itself; I didn’t think there was any way I’d be able to sleep tonight with a sad kitty crying outside my window.
So I called Isaac, because I knew he’d still be awake, and hoped he had a ladder. And, remarkable enough, he didn’t tell me to go to hell, even though he’d just been sitting down to eat something. Instead, like the amazing friend he is, he tied his ladder to the roof of his car and drove over to help. I spent the wait standing under the tree with my flashlight and meowing at the cat. Quite a few people from my neighborhood passed by in that time, and they probably all thought I’d gone mental.
Getting the kitty out of the tree was a two person job. Isaac climbed up and tried to peel the cat off of the tree. Considering how small the cat was, it had an impressive, kung-fu like grip and Did Not Want To Move. He managed to get the cat wrapped up in a towel, which he then handed off to me. I tucked it under my arm like a football and carried it down the ladder.
So, Operation Rescue Cat From Tree was a success. I’m sorry to say that Operation Shove Cat Into Carrier was not, however.
It’s very likely that the cat is a resident of the neighborhood. There are several people here that let their cats outside. I think that these people are all insane. My housing development is next to a highway and two extremely busy streets. We’re also near an open space where there are coyotes. I tend to disagree with the practice of letting cats wander unattended outside to begin with, and here I just worry they’ll end up as road pizza or a coyote snack.
But anyway, this cat didn’t have a collar, so I had wanted to shove it in a carrier, hold it captive in my house, and probably take it to the vet the next day. Because it was quite the adorable little cat as well. Unfortunately the cat had other ideas and escaped. I tried to follow it, but it ran off toward the highway and I didn’t want to pursue, just in case the cat thought that might be a good avenue of escape.
And Isaac still loves me, and most of his blood remained in his body even after his wrestling match with an extremely displeased cat in a tree, so I suppose it could have gone a lot worse.