I never thought I’d be one of those cat ladies who’d have to call the fire department to get my cat out of a tree. Thanks a lot Dim Sum.

I’ve been lucky in that my cats stick to a pretty regular schedule. They go outside around 7 am, come back around noon, start whining to go out again at 3, and then stay out until about 8 pm. When one of the cats doesn’t stick to the schedule, it’s usually because something’s happened. On Wednesday, when Dim Sum didn’t come back at noon, then 1, then 2, and so on, I knew something was wrong.

That evening, Bruce and I walked the neighborhood, calling her name and whistling in the hopes that she would come running out of a neighbor’s yard. She didn’t. We pulled out all our tricks — opening up cans of food outside, clinking dishes, rattling kibble — with no results. With a heavy heart and a lot of pent up anxiety we went to bed hoping she’d be back in the morning.

At the crack of dawn I peeked out to find an empty yard. I opened our front gate to discover a dead gopher. Had Dim Sum dropped off a “present” and been offended that we had turned in without her?

Throughout the day I walked the neighborhood calling out for her. At every turn I worried I would step onto a block and find her dead body on the side of the road. While we live in a very quiet community, where cars cruise by at 10 mph, I had seen cats, including my own, sprint across the street at very inopportune moments. Had Dim Sum made a fatal mistake?

The worst part of not being able to find your pet is imagining the horrible things that may have happened. I started to hope, if she wasn’t just being a jerk, that she was dead as I couldn’t bear to think of her trapped somewhere, starving to death, or worse, injured and unable to get home. As the hours passed I started to lose hope, but at 1pm I took another walk around the block. Just as I headed back to the house I let out one last whistle. This time I heard a faint meowing.

I kept whistling, walking closer to where the meowing was, which brought me outside a home that’s under construction. Curbside was a giant ditch, dug up to place new plumbing. I immediately thought she was somehow stuck inside one of the pipes. I whistled again, but the sound was coming from above. I aimlessly walked around, head focused skywards, trying to find where this god damn meowing was coming from. I knew it was her though, and immediately called Bruce who was working from home. While on the phone I suddenly spotted her calico mess, high above in a neighbor’s tree. Twenty-five feet high!

Now with two people standing on the sidewalk, looking skywards, people started to come out of their houses to see what we were looking at. As soon as we pointed out Dim Sum, they laughed and then moved into action asking what we were all going to do to get her out. The fire department was called by one of the contractor’s working on the aforementioned house, who happened to be a (very cute!) volunteer fireman. Unfortunately, the local FD has a policy not to get involved with cat’s in trees as it puts firemen in danger for a non-life threatening situation. They suggested putting food at the bottom of the tree and waiting.

That wasn’t an option. Luckily our landlord had left us with a 17-foot ladder, which the volunteer fireman (who I was now trying to hook up with my visiting sister-in-law) was ready and willing to climb in order to save our cat. Unfortunately for DJ, Bruce wasn’t going to let just anyone go up and save his Dim Sum.

We propped the ladder to the tree, and despite it being way short of where Dim Sum had perched herself, Bruce climbed up, using the tree climbing knowledge he amassed throughout his childhood. I was at ground level freaking (pardon my french) the fuck out, imagining that at the end of this I would have a cat who nonchalantly walks off the corpse of my dead husband 25 feet below. This seemed like the only likely conclusion as I watched Dim Sum scamper around the tree as Bruce tried to snatch her.

After a few minutes of terrifying theatrics Bruce managed to shove her inside the backpack he had brought up with him and made his way back down. He had a bloody finger from where she had punctured him during the struggle, but all in all everyone was safe. Back at the house we let Dim Sum out of the bag (knee slap!) and she immediately ran out and flopped over on her side, exhausted. After a few minutes of laying there she jumped up and ran to the food bowl and started scarfing down kibble and some leftover scallops I had cut up for her return.

We have no idea when she got stuck in that tree, but I’m pretty sure it happened early on Wednesday and she just didn’t want to fess up to her mistake until the next day. Bruce and I had heard a yowl Wednesday night when we got back from our walk but couldn’t locate it or reproduce it. She’s now grounded for the weekend.

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