Another Fine Mess.

It was all drama here yesterday. F woke to the sound of a mini cat issuing distress calls and Mummy cat uttering back.  That was about 3am.  

It was still howling away at 7am, 

and 9am.  

Just before she went for her swim F hung out the laundry and from the back balcony could see Mummy cat on the side retaining wall at the back with 2 of her 3 kittens.  No.3 seemed to be making its noise from somewhere under the building.

So F being F when she went down for her swim she investigated.  She discovered that No 3 was making all its noise from the bottom of a vent pipe that connected to the heating machinery room under the apartment.  F stood on tippy toes and peered down the pipe and could see two small eyes reflecting light back out of the dark interior.

"Bother", said Pooh.  

It's a favourite saying of hers.

Going off on a tangent, have you ever read (or heard read by Stephen Fry, Judy Dench and Co - I have, we have Pooh-story-time on Sunday nights) the story about Pooh and Piglet trying to catch a hefalump?  Honey jar at the bottom of a pit trap, Pooh raids it in the middle of the night and gets his head stuck in the jar..... the noises from inside the jar in the bottom of the pit, freaked poor ol' Piglet.

This mini cat was making some pretty freaky noises of its own.

We inherited a whole bunch of labelled and unlabelled keys with the apartment.  F trogs off to the basement and tries the full set on the heating room door.  No luck.

F chucks some cat food down the pipe and goes for her swim, and then off to the laiki.

Mini cat goes on making freaky noises all day.  Mummy cat sits on a lower (capped) vent pipe and talks to mini cat.  Eventually Effie and her husband come home from their day out and in her broken Greek F explains the problem to them.  She got stuck on the Greek word for 'trapped'.  

It turns out it's easier to beckon and point.

What followed would do justice to Laurel and Hardy.

(If Mr B is reading this ....cue the music....)

No one has a key.  The neighbours on the 4th floor suggest asking the neighbours on the 5th floor.  Still no key.  Call the landlord.  

He suggests neighbour on the 5th floor, ....

or Adonis the locksmith, ....

or the fire brigade!

Fire brigade sounds genuinely too dramatic in the circumstances (that's the sort of thing you expect in an American sitcom) and while F is trying to connect Effie's husband to Adonis (who doesn't speak any English) there is some shouting in Greek and it turns out that 5th floor neighbour has discovered he has a key after all.  The machinery room is unlocked and yes, it is confirmed, there is a cat in the ventilation system.

It can't go up.  It won't come down.

Head scratching and then 5th floor neighbour proves himself to be a problem solver par excellence.  Put the water hose down the vent pipe and flood the mini cat out.

We haven't seen it because F was holding the hose at the top, but the machinery room must be awash now.

Mini cat was captured, enclosed in a cat-crate, and released into the backyard where it promptly raced to the top of the vent pipe (the highest point it could reach).  Fortunately F had capped the vent pipe with a concrete slab when she turned the water off.  

Mummy cat has a problem: The back yard is enclosed in very high retaining walls.  2 mini cats are where they should be, and one mini cat is close but separate and can't seem to make the last leap to 'home' (which is at the top).  Errant mini cat only stops making that horrific noise when Mummy abandons all else and attends exclusively to its wants.  Its two siblings have been peering, with concerned looks, all day in the direction of the distressed yowling coming from the vent pipe.  Now that they can see their prodigal sibling they seem a lot less concerned.

Well camoflaged

on layers of retaining wall

The humans built some make-shift ramps between levels of the back retaining wall, but it remains to be seen whether mini cats are as good at adopting ramps to problem solve as I, the Tigger, am.  Failing that I guess F could recapture mini cat, climb a ladder and simply place him (or her) back where he (or she) should be.  Good luck with that - it's a pretty quick mini cat.

Mummy cat remains attentive, but she has moved into the ranks of single parent with additional care-giver responsibilities that involve commuting. 

Aw Mum, I hate it when you spit on your hanky and scrub my face

(See?  It's no longer really a kitten. It's a mini cat - moves like a cat, cat-sense yet to develop properly.  Someone needs to tell it to stop messing about on the edges of ledges.)

Footnote from F: Despite Tigger's cynicism about the younger generation, mini cat #3 does seem to have worked it out.  The distress calls eventually subsided and the next time I looked out Mummy cat was trying to keep her eyes on mini cats 1 & 2 who had, it seems, watched #3 arrive home via ramp and decided to use it in reverse to explore a whole new universe.  No 3 mini cat went down and up the ramp a few more times as we watched but never ventured far from the bottom and would race back 'home' at the slightest provocation.  The days adventures had obviously already developed into some 'cat-sense'.