Mewy in Trouble

            It was a dark and stormy night, and Mewy was in trouble, but I didn’t know that yet. My daughters, Juniper and Amanda were small then, but hardy. In the cold country that the Blue Mountains of Northeastern Oregon becomes in winter, children who love outdoors must become hardy. They had bundled up and gone outside to play after dinner.

            I tended the fire in the heater and helped Laura clean up the remnants of dinner.

            Wind blew snow against windows of the house. Our daughters came in the front door, in some distress. Juniper said, “Mewy’s stuck under the walkway. He can’t get out.”

            I reached for my coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, “How did he get under there?”

            “Under the end of the walkway, but he says he can’t get out. He doesn’t know enough to turn around, or he can’t get turned around.”

            When we went out the front door, I could hear him yowling. I said, “Seems like a cat that gets under a walkway could get back out.”

            “We talked and talked to him to try to get him to turn around and go out or back out, but he didn’t move. He just got louder and louder about help help help.”

            Juniper and Amanda had cleared the snow over the part of wooden walkway where Mewy was. I pulled up on the rail of the walkway, then got a shovel from the garage and tried to lever the walkway up, but the wooden rails were frozen into the ground and wouldn’t budge. I said, “We’re going to have to take the top boards off. I’ll go get some tools. Tell him I’m working on it as fast as I can.”

            It was obvious by his uninterrupted yowling that Mewy was not reassured by Amanda and Juniper telling him we would soon get him out, so I hurried to the shop, turned the light on, found a flatbar and a hammer, turned the light off, and trotted back through snow blowing through darkness to the side of the house, where outside lights held night at a respectable distance.

            I tapped the flatbar between the top board directly over Mewy and the rail and pried the board up. Nails coming out of wood made a screeching sound that momentarily competed with Mewy’s song of distress. I pulled the board off and set it aside and pried the next board up. That gave me enough room to extract the cat, which I did and handed him into my daughters’ reaching arms. They worked together to clean and calm him while I nailed the top boards back into place.

            My daughters probably got the credit and gratitude from the cat for getting him out of that cold, dark, tight place. That was all right with me. I was merely the mechanic who brought the tools and the necessary force together to free their much loved cat. They provided the knowledge of his difficulty and the motivation and the spirit to set him free, then the love to comfort him and clean him of the residues of his dark, cold, and dirty prison.

            I walked back to the shop and cut another board to close up the opening Mewy had crawled through to get stuck. I nailed the board into place.

            My daughters, our cat, and I went into the house. We three humans shed our coats, hats, gloves, scarves, and insulated boots. I held my hands out to the heat of the stove, but Amanda and Juniper were too excited to stand still and warm their hands. They told Laura every detail of our adventure and acted out the parts of everyone involved, including Mewy. Then, when she understood what had happened almost as well as if she had been there, we all settled into warm chairs, and Laura began to read aloud from where she had left off earlier in the book of adventure we were working our way through that week.