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Last Updated: Nov 14, 2008 - 12:49:26 PM |
The other night, Engine and Truck 14 responded to a house fire with Engine 1. As we were picking up our equipment, I told a story about a call that I had responded to on that same street, many Christmas Eves ago. I was the officer on C-shift at Engine 1 at the time. I received a call from my battalion chief on a snowy Christmas Eve afternoon. He asked our shift to go to this address and assist a lady with a cat in the tree. We normally do not handle this type of call, but since it was Christmas Eve, he wanted us to see if there was anything that we could do. We arrived, met the lady, and walked behind her house to see a very little fur ball in the top of a very tall tree. There was nothing that we could do, equipment-wise, so I told her to keep all dogs away from the tree, and to put a can of cat food at the base of the tree. Though the lady was not very happy with that answer, we left and returned to
Station 1.
Years later, we had a couple over to our house for dinner. Somehow, the conversation came around to calling for the fire department. This lady told us that she had only called for the fire department once in her lifetime. She went on to say that it was on a Christmas Eve for a cat in the tree. I asked her where she lived. You guessed it; she was the one that I had spoken to on that snowy Christmas Eve. After hearing her story, I told her that I was that fire officer. I then asked her what happened to the cat. She said, against her better judgment, she kept all the dogs away from that tree and put cat food at the base of the tree. She said that in a day or so the cat came down and ate the food.
You may think that this is the funny coincidence, but hold on. A few days after the house fire a lady came to Station 1, asking for the firefighters to come and get a cat out of a very large tree. No, it wasn’t the same lady from my incident, but this lady received the same solution, and did not like the answer any more than my lady did. We have not heard the outcome of this one yet, but if she did what he told her to do, the cat will come down. I have given this answer to a few people over the years, and the outcome has been the same; when the cat gets hungry enough, it will come down, no matter how high in the tree it is.
The old saying goes, “You’ve never seen the skeleton of a dead cat in a tree.”
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