Last week Jo and I rented the movie The Happening. I spend too much time alone in the wilderness with an active imagination to watch horror movies often. Having watched it, I wouldn’t call The Happening a horror movie, but I didn’t know that at the time. Before the movie I was busy distracting myself from settling down and let the dogs out one last time. As soon as they went through the door a squabble erupted with lots of growling and barking. The source was a tan Siamese cat they had chased into a tree.
I wrangled the dogs back inside and investigated. He was about 20 feet up in a skinny aspen tee in our back yard. I climbed the tree to get him down, but it took me a while to get up the tree’s skinny trunk. As I approached him I could see he was still pretty scared. To avoid me he tightrope-walked about 8 feet out from the trunk on a garden hose sized branch. Even with his extraordinary feline balancing talents he was having trouble staying up right. As he balanced near the end, his weight made the branch flex down and he fell. In a demonstration of further feline agility he caught himself and hung cliff-hanger style from his paws. Dangling by only his paws as the elastic branch flexed up and down it was only a matter of time before he lost his strength and fell. I slid down the trunk like it was a fire pole, took off my jacket and ran underneath of him. Holding my jacket like a trampoline I talked to him calmly to “Let go and I’ll catch you.” He hung on for an eternity, which was reality more like sixty seconds. Then mustering all of his strength he did a trembling, slow motion pull up, kicked his feet up and dangled from all four limbs below the branch. He monkey walked, dangling by all fours back to the trunk and pulled himself up onto the top of the branch where it met the trunk. Safe on the trunk, I decided he’d had enough trauma and let him be.
After the movie (bad movie…), I decided to go back out and check on him. He was still there. It was a bitterly cold night which I doubted he could survive, I had to do something. I climbed the tree again pausing about 6 feet below him. He looked at me for a bit and then a dog barked. I made my move and lunged upward on the tree. He tried to escape back out on the narrow branch, but I was too quick. My hand landed right behind his head and locked. I had him. At first he struggled, but after realizing this was futile he went limp. I pulled him into my chest and held him tight as we started down. Down climbing the narrow trunk with only one hand was not easy, but with meticulous foot placement I was able to get down.
He turned out to be an adorable cat. He was very timid, but would open up and become affectionate with a little attention. He had obviously experienced some trauma before he wound up in the backyard. He wasn’t neutered, so we isolated him from the rest of our animals in Jo’s office. She isn’t a cat person, but she got quite attached to him. He definitely like her more than I, maybe we got off to a bad start with the tree and all. We have way too many animals to adopt him. I plastered signs all over the neighborhood, put ads on Craig’s list, and in the Denver post. After a week, no love. My theory is that because my cat deck is visible from the road and the cats can be seen relaxing on it easily that someone abandoned him in our backyard. It’s only a theory, we’ll never really know. After contemplating putting him on a plane to my Mom’s, we decided to accept an offer from a single mother in Colorado Springs to give him a good home. He left last night to start his new life. God speed sir, I wish you well in your new home.
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