Cat Blogging: The Hanging Cat

[elfs]

Omaha and I got Dinah back in early 1993 or so, from our friend Indra, who gave us this little black furball about two and a half years old. Dinah moved in with us when we had a very small apartment. At the time, she was an outdoor cat, spry enough to leap up onto the kitchen counter and then out the window over the sink, so we didn't have a problem keeping her box clean. She still had one, in the back of the closet opposite the kitchen, but she almost never used it except in winter when the door was closed.

The apartment had no screens over the windows, which swung out from casements along the top. Dinah could leap three or four feet at a time, and got it into her head one day that she could leap out the bedroom windows just as readily as she could the kitchen.

The building is on a very steep slope-- such that the kitchen was sunk into the hillside and the kitchen casement window, on the outside, was about knee-high. The bedroom windows, on the other hand, were almost ten feet off the ground.

Omaha heard a loud sound from the bedroom, and went to go look. She didn't see anything odd, so she called out, wondering if it was the cat. "Dinah? Dinah?"

She said she heard the most pitiful "Meow?" sound come from outside the window. She looked out the window and found Dinah hanging from the windowshade cord; it had gotten caught around her haunches and she was just dangling from it, staring down at the ground very far away, looking very pitiful.

Omaha jumped up onto the hood of my car to reach Dinah and disentangle her. The cat was none the worse for it, but she never jumped out that window again.

Comments

[jadiana.livejournal.com]

I once had a cat that liked to come in and out of my windows. I slept on a futon at the time, and one night, laying on the floor, he came bolting through the window, his eyes wild with fear and wide. Yaaroling at the top of his lungs. He ran around and around the room, frantic and in the dark it took me a moment to realise what was going on.

See, he had a potted fern caught on his collar. The wire and hook that normally dangles it from the side of the house was hooked around his collar. So here he was running, thinking something was on his tail, chasing him.

It took a bit to get him free from it, what with his panic and my hysterical laughing.

I got rid of the collar that night and he never wore one again.

[skitten.livejournal.com]

oh my goodness!

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm glad you were around to get her untangled, she could have hurt herself horribly that way. She really was a lucky kitty, wasn't she?