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When I was in grad school I lived in a duplex in a small rural neighborhood outside Athens, Georgia for a while, one of those streets where some developer built a dozen or so houses that all look more-or-less alike. Each unit had a small wooden deck in the back.
My deck had a HUGE old pine tree growing right through the middle of it. It was a great place to attach a hammock.
Anyway, one day my GF and I were sitting out back and a neighborhood cat came streaking across the lawn and RAN up the tree. It stopped at the first branch, which was probably twenty feet or so up the trunk. We tried to talk it down but it wasn't having any of that, so eventually we gave up, figuring if it climbed up it would climb down.
The next day the cat was still up there. It was kind of weird sitting out back-- occasionally it would meow from up there.
On day three I tried coaxing it down with food. It looked like it wanted down, but was afraid. I called it, left food for it, and so on, but it wouldn't come down.
On the FIFTH day I got the bright idea of hitting it with a stream of water from my garden hose, figuring it would come down as fast as it could when it got wet. I pulled out the hose and cranked open the faucet. The cat retreated farther UP the tree, climbing all the way into the top branches, far higher than I could spray water, even at maximum pressure.
After about a week and a half I began to get desperate. I called the fire department-- they said "no way-- real firemen don't rescue cats, only the ones in movies do that." I tried the power company, but they said they didn't have a lift that could reach that high. Ditto for all the local tree services, although a couple offered to cut the tree down with the cat in it.
Bear in mind that it was summer in Georgia, 90 F plus every afternoon. The cat had no food or water. We started to think the cat had died up there, but every day we'd hear it meowing, or moving around, scratching the bark.
On day FIFTEEN a fellow grad student tried to climb the tree with spikes but couldn't get high enough to reach the cat, which was obviously weak by that time. Nonetheless it eluded capture and the guy who climbed the tree was lucky not to get hurt (or killed!).
On day NINETEEN I heard some scrambling from the upper branches and looked up just in time to see the cat plummeting toward the ground. It flattened when it hit and I thought it must be dead, but it BOUNCED and landed on all four feet, already running. It disappeared into the shrubbery in a flash. I never saw it again, never found out whether it survived, but it was running fast the last time I saw it.
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