How to get a cat out of a tree
Today was one of those farm days where an
emergency crops up and you have to spend all day treading water just to
catch back up. Overnight, Strider had climbed 30 feet up a box
elder to escape the dogs, and he refused to come down.
I tried coaxing him from our seven foot ladder, to no avail. Next
try was throwing a rope over the branch and hoisting up a bucket with
tuna in the bottom in the vain hope that he might be tempted to jump in
and be gently lowered to the ground. Hah!
We figured that if we made him a ramp, he might be willing to walk down
a gentler incline. But by this time (after lunch), he had
hunkered down and wasn't willing to try to walk down our carefully
rigged up ramp.
So we went over to the
neighbor's and borrowed a huge ladder (and their truck to carry it
in.) It had started snowing lightly and for once I was impatient
as my movie star neighbor waxed eloquent about the special effects in
the horror movie he'd been shooting --- the story was top notch, as
always, but my mind was on poor little Strider getting cold and wet up
in the crotch of the box elder.
At last, we tore ourselves away and drove home through a dry floodplain
until we were within sight of the tree. There was Strider...and
then there he was streaking down the side of the tree and leaping the
last seven feet to end up safely on the ground. The combination
of the loud engine and snow was too much for him and he figured he'd
jolly well rescue himself! Nevertheless, we're going to hang onto
the long ladder until the visiting dog returns to his regular home on
Sunday.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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