"Meow!" it cried back, but the crier was nowhere to be seen. Strange! Where there is a meow, there is a cat, yes? I continued playing Feline Marco Polo with the invisible cat until eventually, I pinpointed the sound- it was coming from underneath the porch- right beneath the kitchen radiator-, but still inside the house! But I was quite sure there was no cat in our kitchen, which meant that it was stuck in the crawl space between the concrete foundation and the floor of the house! All the radiator vents were netted shut, and I wasn't aware of any other openings, so how did it get in there in the first place, and why didn't it just go out the way it came in? But it was no use wondering because for whatever reason, it was just meowing and meowing so piteously, and not even trying to move from its spot.
I ran back into the family room and into the kitchen, opened the radiator vent and meowed.
I ran back into the family room and into the kitchen, opened the radiator vent and meowed.
"Meow!" the cat cried back. It sounded so distressed! I had to get it out. Umma had mentioned she'd heard mewing a couple days ago, but couldn't find the cat, so assuming it was the same cat, this little guy had been stuck in the crawl space for at least 2 or 3 days with neither food nor drink nor merry company. Who knew how much longer it would last before it breathed its last breath, after which we'd have an expired, rotting cat in the foundation of our house? But more to the point, how to get it out? I opened the vent and tried to meow it out (I have a very realistic meow), and the kitten and I got a great conversation going- but it still would not come out of the radiator. (At the time, I didn't know that the hole in the radiator led to the gas pipe, so clearly the cat could not escape through the radiator.) I went back to the pics, hoping that ideas would come to me as I flipped through embarrassing pictures from my youth.
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