The Cat

I could hear it the moment I got out of the car this morning. The mewling and meowing were echoing off the walls of the garage in the sort of frantic way a cat has of telling you it’s hungry or stuck or hurt or maybe just in heat and looking for a mate. The garage at the mill has large doors that close and I was thinking that perhaps it had been stuck in there overnight, but the more I looked for him the less I found him.

It’s not the first time an animal has gotten stuck behind the great metal doors. There was, of course, the crow, whose dead body I found next to my car years ago, and whose means of death is still a mystery. There have been a few pigeons, who, under some mistaken pretense, decided the garage and its few exposed beams, held promise for a nest. In fact there was once another cat that had squeezed through a crack in the cement walls and then found it impossible to go back the way he came.

I started looking under cars and in the corners, but every time I moved further away from my parking space, the direction of the cries kept bringing me back. I don’t know what made me look up, but I did, and there standing on the two-by-four beams exposed when the garage started leaking; stood the cat. I have no idea how it got up there, as there was no clear way for him to climb up that high—as least as far as I could see.

I walked into the mill, hung up my coat and put away my lunch pail—told my boss I’d be right back, and headed back into the garage. I’ve done this sort of work before—I am, if nothing else, a decent cat rescuer.

There has been an old wooden ladder in the back corner for the past year or so—Left lying there from the last time the florescent lights were changed. It was just tall enough for me to reach up past the ballasts to touch the cat. I took the fact that he didn’t immediately bite me to be a good sign. The only thing most cat’s hate more than being stuck in high places, is being rescued from high places. My feeling is that, in an effort to regain their dignity, once they get face to face, they have a tendency to put the blame of their predicament squarely upon the person they are looking at. We did fine with the petting, but the moment I grabbed him for our decent, things got a little more dicey. Though in all fairness, once he got his claws dug firmly into my shoulder blades, he calmed down enough to let me bring him down.

He was pretty pissed about the box I then put him in, but it was the only way I could figure getting him out of the garage since he wasn’t following me and had decided to just hide under cars for a while. I set him free just outside the doors, in the small green area near the Spanish Steps and though he screamed and cried and pitched a fit, once I lifted the box lid he calmed down and headed straight into the blackberry brambles.

I suppose that I could have taken him in to the Humane Society. They saved our blind cat, Zane, once, after she had gotten out of the trailer and wound up across the highway in the next trailer park over. But I didn’t want to take the chance that he’d be put to sleep, all because he was fool enough to get stuck someplace he couldn’t get down from. No…I needed to give him another chance. Let the next person take him in, or let him roam free the rest of his life.

On my way into the mill, a young black woman who lives in the shelter next door and who also parks in the garage, stepped outside and said “Thanks for rescuing that cat. He was just so high up there, I didn’t know what to do.”

Yeah, that’s me alright—the newest hero in the Kitty Liberation Army of the World’s Book of Days.