The Bookcase



Kathump! Kathump!


“Did you hear that?” My husband wakes me at 2 am. Of course, I didn’t hear that and I still didn’t, despite him telling me that it was still going on.

“Listen,” he instructs me.

Finally, after about ten minutes we decide to get out of bed. I thought it was probably one of the cats up to something because things always go thump in the night around the house. I wasn’t very concerned, but he was, so we decided to investigate. It is common to think you hear a herd of elephants upstairs as they chase each other. Noises just come with owning a cat.

He wakes me up regularly when he nears noises. I don’t get that much sleep, so I always figure it can wait until morning with not a lot of harm done.

We inched forward through the house, stopping at intervals to listen for the sound, which was intermittent, but got louder as we approached his office.

We looked around and all was in order. However, the sound soon alerted us to a trapped cat in the corner behind a six-foot high bookcase. Hmmm... Now how did she manage that one? We knew darn well a cat could not jump that high in the air.

The ‘kathump’ was her jumping behind there, actually thinking she could jump all the way to the top and get back up the way she got down.

We eased the bookcase out and she came running out, not looking very upset over things, but then this cat is a cat that, trapped in the pantry all day on occasion, seems to look at this as an adventure of some sort. She loves to climb the shelves in there and entertains herself without making a peep. Usually the only way we discover her is when we go to the pantry for something.

We put everything back in place and went back to bed.

It wasn’t two nights later and the same thing happened yet again. We rescued her for a second time and moved everything clear, thinking she must have used a chair, or bench, to reach the top of the bookcase in the first place.

A week or so later we discovered how she was achieving her feat. She jumped up on the credenza against the other wall, with the craftiness only a cat can muster, walked across the curtain rod reaching her desired destination – the bookcase in the corner. From there she could jump down to the floor, trapping herself once more between the wall and bookcase with no way out.

I will never know exactly what enters this cat’s mind, but she is a determined little thing. We had to erect a barrier we could stand up on the curtain rod. Its purpose – to deter her for a month until she was on to something else she could get into that would be easier, making her forget about this adventure – or has she? You can never be sure when dealing with a cat.