Kitty Noises

Cats can make a lot of different sounds. Sometimes they meow at the door until someone lets them into the house. Sometimes they curl up on your lap and purr contentedly. Other times they might knock something off a shelf and send it crashing to the floor. And sometimes they let out a sorry sounding cry for help as a wild animal devours their flesh while their owner stands helplessly by. Our cat made one of those noises last night. Can you guess which one? 

The cats meow at the door all the time, so I probably wouldn’t take the time to write about that event and I’m not sappy enough to write about them purring on my lap. If one of them knocked over something valuable I might be willing to write about it, but for the most part, there isn’t anything breakable of much value on any of our shelves. That leaves us with only one remaining option: wild animals. 

The last of the kids had just been put to bed and my wife and I were buttoning up the house for the night when we heard the sound. It was a pathetic and terrified screeching meow that came from just outside the living room window. “Get out there!” my wife demanded as she froze in her tracks. I ran to the front door only to be reminded that the door knob had broken earlier in the day and there was no way to open it. Plan B was to go out the back and run around the house into the front yard, but the back gate was locked and it would take too long to get the key. The final option was to run to the garage and out into the front yard that way. By the time I figured out the best way to get to the helpless cat, it was too late, she was gone. I searched all the usual places and my son even brought a flashlight out, but, alas, no glow-in-the-dark eyes ever peered back at me. 

A few minutes later, my wife joined us with a bag of kitty treats. She shook the bag a few times and we heard it, a faint meow, kind of like the “I’m at the door, let me in” sort of meow, but quieter. “I think I hear something,” I said. “Shake it again.” So she did and the cat responded again with the same cry. We flashed the lights around the bushes in another vain attempt to find the presumably mangled cat. I mentioned to my wife that when I first came out I had heard some rustling in the bushes so we focused our attention in that area and heard a third cry, this time from above. As we gazed upwards, high above us in a leafless tree sat a shaking cat. 

“Come on kitty,” my wife called out again shaking the bag of treats. The cat tried to find a route down, but apparently in her hasty flight up the tree, she had neglected to map out a path of retreat. “Go get the ladder,” Mommy suggested without really leaving any room for me to decline. A few minutes later, clad in only shorts and a t-shirt on a cold dark night, I found myself climbing a ladder to rescue a cat from a tree. 

By the time I had come down, half the family was waiting for me on the lawn and I was immediately told to put the cat in bed with my oldest daughter who desperately wanted to know that her kitty was okay. Somehow this little cat had escaped the jaws of a violent beast and scurried up a tree to safety seconds before being torn apart and came out of it completely unscathed. 

As I drifted off to sleep later that night, little did I know that the hamster was busy escaping from her cage and slipping out into the darkened house; the house that was guarded by the recently rescued kitty.