Blood, sweat and meows

Where’s my kitten?? (c) zandrascreations.com

I’d been hearing piteous meowing in the village and, after a second sleepless night, traced it to an absent friend’s garden. The tiny perpetrator was stuck high, high in a tree and shivering after earlier heavy rainfall.

The family (mine) convened: “We’ll have to call the fire brigade!”

But our local pompiers are all volunteers and at the time (last summer) were probably quite busy dowsing wildfires and rescuing people. I felt iffy about calling them out for a distressed kitten in a tree. (Plus it’s such a cliché!)

We decided to send G up a ladder instead, since he claimed not to get vertigo.

The neighbour’s permission duly granted, we trooped into her garden armed with the longest ladder we could find.

Up G climbed.

The kitten climbed nimbly higher. A lot higher.

G descended.

The family convened again.

We decided to post a message on our local FB group. We quickly got several offers of help, but before we could activate any, another neighbour -- stuck in hospital with a broken hip -- read my post and asked her daughter and son-in-law to assist.

They turned up at the house where we were convening yet again.

The problem explained, the son-in-law took over. He shimmied up the tree like a monkey, grabbed the astonished kitten and stuffed it into a handy carrier bag…from which it immediately escaped, lacerating its captor/rescuer’s hand in the process.

At this point G, who was in the tree providing back-up, managed to "nudge" it off its perch with his foot, before it could disappear again to the furthermost reaches…

It plummeted 10 metres to the earth. There was a sickening thump. We held our collective breath… But up it sprang, dusting itself off before speeding away to its anxiously pacing mummy-cat, who (hopefully) boxed its ears.

The son-in-law’s hands were dripping with blood by then, but he shrugged it off with a diffident head-shake. "Ce n'est rien."

(His wife however was heard to mutter: “All that for a cat.”)