Gray Boy, moments after his triumphant (and totally not-dead) return

Gray Boy, the newest feralish cat we have assimilated into our colony, climbed up the neighbor's tree and couldn't figure out how to get down. He whined incessantly from one of the highest branches, some 40 feet up. With some difficultly I could make it over to the tree, hoping the neighbors wouldn't notice the sweaty bald guy running around their yard. But despite my coaxing, he wouldn't or couldn't get down. He's an odd duck, a cat born indoors but never socialized to humans. So he's a feral cat who never really lived outdoors before. This was probably his first tree, then, and he clearly didn't have the appropriate life skills to figure out how one gets down from a tree once one gets up there. He continued to fret, making me nuts for the next two days. I took the day off from work to devise a bunch of ill-advised and ultimately useless escape tools. This included:

• Several 2x4s screwed together with small wooden cross-pieces nailed on the broadside to create a narrow, ladder-like device (this proved to be way too heavy and then it broke when I was trying to lean it up against the tree)
• A rope with a metal weight on one end, to be tossed up and over a branch (one NEAR the cat, without HITTING the cat); i couldn't get the damn thing anywhere NEAR the cat anyway, and later tried tying the rope to an old basketball I found which also didn't work and jammed my thumb when I tried to catch the ball
• Two wooden closet rods attached end to end, capped with a plastic vacuum cleaner tube and a wire hanger, meant to hang the rope over a high branch with which to pull a laundry basket/trap up to the cat; needless to say this didn't work
• The pole then itself was attached to the laundry basket and despite actually getting it right up to the cat, the bastard refused to take the bait
• Smearing incredibly gross sardine and mackerel canned cat food on the lower trunk of the tree in the expectation that a starving cat will forget his other fears in order to get at the chow; this produced only swarms and swarms of flies and, by now, maggots
• Finally, an extra-long garden hose was procured with the semi-shameful intent of blasting the cat out of the tree; luckily for the cat residential water lines turn out to not have much in the way of water pressure over distance so the the water produced a fine mist which at best gave him some water to drink off the leaves

Monday night he made some impressive moves towards walking across a branch and looking like he was going to jump onto a lower clutch of vines which would make getting down relatively easy. But at the last minute he balked and went back to his high perch, meowing all the way. We threw in the towel at that point and I made a list of the tree service companies I would call the next day to ask if they performed 'cat retrieval services.'

This entire ordeal was supplemented with horror stories from the Internet about other cats who never made it down from their trees. The Internet, if it has no other purpose, can really make you feel bad about whatever crisis you are currently facing. Every web page that deals with cats in trees begins with a couple of semi-useful tips, followed by a hail of "my friend's neighbors' cat" stories about how the cat climbed up and died of starvation, or a raccoon ate it, or a hunter shot it, or a slow-acting disease took root, all while poor fluffy was crying at the top of a 100-foot Douglas Fir tree.

At about 10:30PM we went into the yard for one more cat-calling session. An NYPD helicopter was circling the block, casting its spotlight everywhere and making a ruckus. We figured there was no way this cat was coming down with all this commotion. And then, in a flash of the spotlight, I spied a gray cat padding through the patio: Gray Boy.

We'll never know exactly how he did it, but he got down by himself. Which was the very first advice I got from my neighbor, "When he's hungry enough, he'll come down on his own." But his back story and his incessant mewling made me think otherwise. Lesson learned: give the cat some real time to work up the nerve to get down, and do NOT collect advice from the web for this sort of thing. Those cat people are vicious.