When I got back from working out at the gym early this morning, my wife was waiting at the door. “Help!” she said, rather frantically.
“What happened?” I asked, wondering what had gone wrong already, before 7 o’ clock in the morning, and wondering further about just how bad it was going to be.
“The cat got a chipmunk,” she said hurriedly. “It’s loose in our bedroom. We’ve got to get it out!”
Sasha, the great hunter of our two felines, and who just Sunday morning brought in a blue jay before thinking better of it, dropping the bird (inside the house), and then running and hiding from it under the bed, was this morning locked outside after she dropped the terrified rodent on the floor of our room, quite pleased with herself.
We looked for the chipmunk, but couldn’t find it, so it was time to let Sasha back in. She located it immediately, in the corner behind a book case. With the chipmunk located, we again removed her from the scene, and built a barrier out of shoes, pillows, towels, boxes—whatever we could find—designed to funnel the chipmunk out into the hall and then hopefully out the back door.
It worked. She ran into the hall. Unfortunately, we left a closet open, so she never made it to the back door.
We dismantled the closet.
The chipmunk ran down the hall and into the kitchen, but instead of going outside kept going into the dining room where it hid under a chair. We built another set of barriers—Tupperware, the table leaf, a purse, and so on—to head the chipmunk back into the kitchen and out the door.
It jumped our barriers, leaping straight up, what seemed to be a couple feet into the air. Who knew a chipmunk could do such a thing?
And so it went. Eventually we did get it out the door. I’m not sure who was more frazzled at that point—Linda and me or the chipmunk!
Something similar happened to us when Coralie was about 3. She came to us when she was supposed to have her afternoon nap and said that there was a 'thing' under her bed. And there was! We never really did identify it as it was really fast, we thought it might have been a meerkat (we don't get squirrels in this part of SA) - it jumped into her cupboard, higher than head height, jumped out, freaked us all out and then eventually went out the window!
Hearts pound!!
Posted by: Coral | May 23, 2008 at 01:41 AM
Wow. A meerkat!
Our story involves a bunkbed, three children, the middle of the night, flashlights and a very frightened raccoon.
No cat, though, so it ended happily.
Come to think of it, I wonder where the cat was?
Posted by: mindy | June 03, 2008 at 05:56 PM