Cat, Tree & Me

A story I failed to mention last week:

We were getting ready for bed and a lot of nights, one or both of the cats will go outside while I'm walking Emma before bed.  This time they both went out and it just so happened that the neighbor's dog, Samson, noticed us and came over.  Samson's a pretty nice dog.  He's a little bit bigger than Emma and all he really wants is for Emma or one of the cats to play with him.  Of course, Emma's some kind of snoot and won't play with other dogs and the only dog the cats will go near is Emma, so poor Samson usually finds himself out of luck when he comes over to our house.

This night, he must have got too close to Mama Kitty because I heard her hiss and then him yelp and then Izzy chased him back to his house.  None of this was a big deal until another dog came to Samson's rescue and chased Izzy up a pine tree behind our house.  Unfortunately for me, the pine tree Izzy chose was half dead and every branch he touched on the way up broke off.  He finally found a solid branch around 16 feet in the air.

So DeAnne and I hear all this and we get some flashlights and head down to the woods and start looking for Izzy.  We find him and then the question becomes, how do we get him down?  Blessedly, we just happen to have a 10' ladder, so I get that, lean it up against the tree and climb to about the 2nd to top rung just to find I'm way too short to get him.  I ended up having to steel my nerve and stand on the very top of the ladder, hugging the tree for dear life with one arm and reaching for Izzy with the other.  Thankfully, he was ready to come down and when he saw my arm was close enough to reach, he made his way down my arm and on to my shoulder.

Total time for rescue: about 40 minutes.  I never, ever want to be a fireman.

--Paul