If cats have a rite of passage, or milestones along the way to maturity, our cat Louie has passed yet another, leaving only one that we can think of. He has done all the cute kitten things, graduating to catching and eating bugs. His next hurdle was the all-important tree-climb (with the obligatory “getting stuck” phase). This was accomplished on Saturday.
My wife has been feeling guilty about keeping him inside, especially when he sits at the window and stares out, meowing on occasion. We have begun to let him out in the backyard when the weather is nice, and usually on the weekends when we are home. He has loved frolicking in our backyard, flitting from bush to bush, and making valiant leaps in the air to catch a passing bug. The big advantage for us is he is exhausted when he is done and will sit on our laps and sleep, which is rare for him on regular occasions.
Our backyard has but one tree, and it is a towering cedar. If I were to guess I would say it is about 4o feet high, maybe 50, and infested with birds in the spring. We have never seen Louie climb a tree, nor show any interest in the activity. In one moment he was laying in the tall grass, and the next he was streaking across the yard, leaped for the tree, and was soon perched on its lowest branches. My wife saw this and went over to him, and retrieved him.
It was an exciting moment in our kitty’s life. We snuggled him some and fed him some lunch, then put him back outside. Round one had apparently gone to the tree, for Louie again mounted the tree and began his ascent. By the time we noticed he was a good 7 feet up the tree, and looking quite pleased with himself, so pleased he even posed for some pictures (here, here, and here). There were points where he looked as if he were scared, but it must have been an illusion for he continued to climb. We decided to let him enjoy himself, although I had this fear he would be the stereotypical kitten stuck in a tree. About halfway up the tree the birds became aware of his presence and began making a fuss. This would have been fun except a few of the birds were bigger than Louie and I feared what would happen should he further provoke him. Soon enough the birds calmed down and Louie was as high as he wanted to go, and sure enough he was stuck.
It was at about this time that I began wondering how the fire department would be able to get him out of our tree. Since it is in our backyard, and our backyard is surrounded by other backyards I wondered if their boom ladders could reach far enough. I thought I would climb the tree myself and retrieve the cat, but where the branches could support my weight they were too thick to allow my mass through their maze. All the while the cat is 20 feet up and crying and we are both trying to talk him down. What a silly sight it must have been, but it worked. The more we talked to him, reassuring him he would be okay, the more he climbed down branch by branch. His progress was not swift, he was still crying, and he would sometimes climb back up. Resolved that I would need to get up the tree a ways and grab him I went for the ladder. At that same moment Louie missed a branch he was aiming for and slid down the tree to land with a thump on the ground.
All three of us were stunned, and two of us were quite worried about Louie’s plummet back to earth. It was unfounded. Louie was surprised to be on the ground, and came bounding over first to me, then to the other side of the yard to my wife, then began frolicking about the yard once more. We quickly scooped him up and brought him in the house for some observation. Apart from a very slight limp he was fine, happy, and eager to go back outside.
Our little kitty is growing up. He is learning how to climb up trees, and realizing he needs to learn how to climb down them too. While this whole thing was happening I kept thinking about how one day I will have children and they will need to learn to climb up their own metaphorical trees, and also see the need to know how to climb back down them. The agony of watching a little kitty scare himself is nothing like the agony of a parent watching a child scare himself, or so I expect.