Cinnamon

Cinnamon was one tough cookie. He wasn't spicy, but he was calmly defiant like a statue that could not be budged. He was 60 feet high and far out at the end of a long, arching branch of a very large oak tree where I could not go. I was about 10 feet from him, and we had a long, friendly standoff while I waited for him to come to me and he waited for me to leave. I'm a very patient rescuer because cats often need a long time to see that I am not a threat. I am so patient that the cat owners sometimes get bored and tired and go inside to wait for me to finish. I was patient with Cinnamon too, but Cinnamon was more patient than I was. In the standoff and patience game, Cinnamon won.

Cinnamon is a two-year-old orange tabby boy who was stuck in a tree in Leonville, Louisiana for five nights. Silly me. I thought his rescue would be easy. He was originally stuck on a short, dead stub about 30 feet high in a tree in a long line of fence-line trees between a corn field and a long, hard-packed, gravel driveway. The rescue appeared simple and easy enough. I installed my rope in his tree without any trouble or excessive commotion, and I climbed up to him only to find he wasn't there anymore. I looked all around and could not find him. Krystal, his owner down below, looked for him too and also could not find him. She moved to the other side of the tree line and searched from there while I continued to trace every branch of every nearby tree from my high vantage point. After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I heard Krystal gasp. She found him.

I went back down to the ground to where Krystal was so she could show me where Cinnamon was. Cinnamon had moved from the original tree to a large oak tree and moved as far from me as the tree would allow. He was now twice as high and perched directly over the edge of the hard, gravel driveway and the electrical power lines than ran alongside it. I installed my rope about ten feet from him and climbed up to him. I could not go out any farther toward him, so I did my best to lure him to me. Charm failed. Dry food, no response. Wet food, no response. Churu squeeze tube treat, no response. I held the food at the end of an extendable pole right in front of his face and directly under his nose, and that stone-faced statue did not budge. I turned my back and ignored him. He ignored me too.

Cinnamon was barely within reach of my catch-pole, but it would be impossible to manipulate that long pole through all the dense limbs and foliage between and around us, especially with him at the end of it grabbing at all those limbs. With all that struggle, it would be too easy for him to slip out and fall. Normally, I would set a trap on his limb facing him and leave, but I could not find a place on that branch where a trap would fit, and since he was on one of two branches running roughly parallel to each other, he could easily avoid the trap by walking along the other branch. In hindsight, I should have forced a trap to fit somewhere in there anyway, but at the time, I didn't know what else to do, so I left with the intention of returning the next morning to try again. I hated to disappoint Krystal and her two, sweet, little girls with a failed mission, but I promised I would return the next day and get Cinnamon down. Everything about the situation is likely to be very different the next day, so I was optimistic that I would be successful.

Early the next morning, Krystal opened the door to go out to check on Cinnamon, and Cinnamon was already waiting there at the door and came running inside. We don't know if he climbed down or fell, and Cinnamon, in typical cat-like fashion, doesn't want to talk about it. Regardless, all is well in the household again, and Cinnamon, to everyone's delight, has resumed sleeping in the bed with the girls each night.