The Cat and the Squirrel

First, let me say that I grew up in Moncton NB, and we NEVER saw squirrels growing up. We see them a bit nowadays. 

One day in 1987... 

My cat wants to go outside. Nothing new here. As I'm letting her out, I notice a squirrel in our tree (a double trunked tree) in the front yard. Cute! I watch as my cat runs up the tree after it, and the squirrel just jumps over to the other tree. My cat stops and just looks down and then over at the other tree, in a "wtf" kind of way. She runs down, then up the other tree. The squirrel jumps back to the first tree.

I'm still so excited that I'm seeing a squirrel. I run to grab some bread to try and feed it, but when i come back to the front door, my cat is begging to come back inside. Weird. I open the door and she beelines to the basement. Again, weird. So I follow her to the stove. You know those black stoves with the pipe that goes to the chimney. Well, I can hear the squirrel running back and forth inside the pipe.

Let's stop here and please tell me how did my cat know that the squirrel went down the chimney. Like, how did she even know what the chimney was? That the chimney led to the basement. Impressive.

Anyway, I call my mom at work and I say "mom, there's a squirrel in the stove, can I open the door?", and she's like "don't let it in the house!!!" and I'm all "don't worry, I got this."

Now let me explain to you how naive I was. It's like I thought I was living in a cartoon or something. Here was my plan. I built a fort around the stove with all the cushions from the couch, even though I fully saw the squirrel jump from one tree to the other. Then, we had an old bird cage, so I put that in the fort with the door open. Then I put out a trail of bread leading to the bird cage!! As if the squirrel was going to be like, Ooooh bread, three steps, Ooooh bread, three steps, Oooooh bread, gotcha... Was I 6? No I was 15!

Of course when I opened the doors to the stove, the squirrel jumped down, covered in soot, and just proceeded to run around the basement like a maniac.

Long story not so short, it took us about 7 hours to get him out and I missed a huge school event that night.