The Kitten up a Tree Story



 Last month our new kitten, Chica, was outside past dusk one evening. It was quite dark when I went out and called for her. Usually she comes to me right away, but this time all I heard was her little mew. After some looking around I discovered that she was up a hickory tree quite close to the house.  I had no idea in the dark just how far up she was, but was confident she would come down on her own overnight. 

She didn’t. 

Turns out she was close to 40 ft up in the fork of the tree. 


As the next day went on we were increasingly less confident that she would come down on her own. She made little attempts to descend, but chickened out each time.  

The next night passed and it got down to 13 degrees.  I figured she’d freeze or get picked off by an owl. I barely slept.  But she was still there in the morning.  

Finally Gary came up with his idea to get her down. He would put a little platform on a pole and use the dozer to get it up to her. We would put food on it, she would get on it, then he’d move the pole away from the tree and voila, she’d be down.  

It didn’t quite work like that.

Here he is sawing a notch into the butt of a pole he’d cut.



Then he clamped the jaws of the bulldozer bucket onto the notch. 


Then he took the top wooden circle of a spool he’d had wire on and rigged it onto the top of the pole.  He fixed a bit of carpet onto it and then stapled the bottoms of a milk jug and vinegar jug for food and water.


Of course as soon as he moved the dozer bucket this whole contraption went flying up into the air flinging the vinegar bottle off.  Haha It was super bouncy at the end of the 40 ft long pole.  

But he got it up close to the cat.

You can just barely see her as a little light gray spot in the fork of the tree.  

Of course she was of no mind to just waltz out onto the platform. She crawled around the other side of the tree and clung to the side.  I saw there was no way she was going to get out onto the platform, she was too scared, so I told Gary to just start flailing the pole.  That’s what he did and it took her about 15 seconds to get down the tree.  At one point she just fell for a few feet to a lower limb. She jumped down onto the shed and I caught her from there.

Here she is when I got her inside.  A hungry kitty, but none the worse for having stayed up a tree for about 42 hours.


We were afraid her ears would be frost bitten. But they are fine.  I pray she doesn’t do that again!

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