After all the relatively easy rescues I have done lately, I knew I was due for some difficult ones, and this was the day when fate decided to present two challenging rescues to me. The first was for Panther, a four-year-old black cat in Denham Springs I twice rescued two years ago. Although Panther is normally wary of strangers, I had no trouble with him at the first two rescues and found him quite cooperative, so I was not expecting anything different this time.Panther was about 35 feet high in a leaning Tallow tree, and I had no place above him to install my rope. Instead, I installed it well below him and worked my way up to him. Everything was going well at first. We re-introduced ourselves, and he appeared calm and let me pet him, but because I did not have a rope above him, I could not pull myself up high enough to reach him comfortably. I held a carrier up to him, but he didn't appear to like that very much. I needed to get higher, so I moved a small limb out of my way and pulled myself around to the other side of the stem where I could get a foothold. I'm not sure what scared him -- moving the limb, or shaking the stem, or something else -- but Panther scampered up the stem even higher. If this stem had been vertical, I could have climbed higher, but I did not feel safe going any higher on this leaning stem. I could not lure Panther down any lower to me, so I reluctantly decided to abort the rescue with the intention of returning the next day when, hopefully, Panther will have found a way to go down lower in the tree.
From there, I drove to Hammond to rescue Charlie, a four-year-old Siamese who had spent one night in a tree in the wooded area behind his home. His owners, Russ and Tish, were very worried about him. When Russ led me into the woods to the tree which held Charlie captive, I was very discouraged by what I saw. Charlie was only 20 feet high, but he was in a large, sickly Sweetgum tree whose limbs were borderline dead or dying. It didn't matter since there was no way to shoot a line into the tree above Charlie anyway, because all the high vines and bushes all around the tree made that impossible. The only way to climb this tree was to climb it like one would a limbless pole which is a slow, tedious, and strenuous method better suited for small stems. The large trunk of this tree combined with the vines attached to it made this climbing method even more difficult.
