Monday, January 11, 2010

How High Can One Go?

Mrrrrr Friends,

It's been a few days since I had a chance to go out. Oom went to a conference - like she needs to spend more time talking to people - and Boo didn't see fit to get me out for a walk. He did let me hang out on the porch so I could check tracks and sniff the winds.

Anyway, I've been pent up, and I relished the chance this morning to get out into the world, go down to my brook, play in the snow, and check out the various animal tracks I had been seeing for days. (No porcupines here, but deer, squirrels, a few too many dog tracks and what Oom and I think might have been a fox.)

After doing a tour around the neighbor's yard - since my neighbor cat-pal Brewster isn't getting out, I'm covering his perimeter duty - I got an urge to do some climbing.

It started out as an innocent clawing of the arbor vitae...an exercise I engage in often, as you can note in the first photo from my last blog post. Then a few fulsome tugs up the trunk, and I was in familiar 7 to 8 foot territory. Oom was happy to see me up and about.

The urge was on me at this point, and I just kept going...

I explored some outer branches.

At this point, I had been up a good 20 minutes and attained an estimated 25 feet. I could sense Oom wasn't completely comfortable; neither was the Blue Jay that flew into the tree thinking I was a crow to be harassed...surprise! He left pretty quick without so much as a peep.

In the end, I got up to the top of the main trunk.

I gotta admit, I had a little trouble at this point figuring out how to get down. The branches were no longer like stairs. Oom was telling me to come along and reaching for a ladder, so I had to resort to a butt-down, "bear-cub" strategy. Not pretty, but it works.

I guess you can climb pretty high, but chances are you've probably left some folks behind, and they're probably worried that you might get stuck or fall. In the end, a smart cat finds his way back down to earth in a timely fashion. If you stay up too high, too long, it's not fun anymore.