KITTEN’S ESCAPADE

Taranaki Daily News, 21 November 1933, Page 3

KITTEN’S ESCAPADE

TRAPPED IN A WALL. FIVE DAYS WITHOUT FOOD. Making tire most of its nine lives, ‘ a tabby kitten, born five weeks previously, recently completed in a Salvation Army home in Melbourne an amazing escapade that necessitated the uprooting of a floor, and the excavation of portions of walls all over the building. In an inquiring mood one day, the kitten stretched her wobbly legs in a clumsy canter over the floor. Although "too young to know a mouse if she saw it, some instinct drew her to a hole in the wall, about the .size of a tennis ball. A second later, an officer walked in in time to notice the tip of a tail disappearing -through the hole. “I thought there were rats about,” she said. Later in the day the mother cat grew restless. She prowled round all the rooms, but could not find her youngest kitten. Late that night a plaintive mew was heard, but it could not be located. Like a ghostly wail it seemed to come from the ceiling, and then from the wall, and then near the stairs. But there was still no kitten. Next day men moved bricks out of a wall in a downstairs room where a faint wail sounded, but there was nothing there. They tried taking up the floor, in vain. For four days and four nights a carpenter and his assistants, and members of the home, followed, the ghostly mewing, pulling out bricks and putting them back, while the mother cat prowled around. At last, on the-fifth day, a very faint mew was heard by the carpenter when he removed some bricks by the back stairs, near the dormitory. He then took up a little flooring in the dormitory, and there, weak, but mewing, was the kitten.

The kitten had been for nearly five days without a thing to eat or drink. She had never seen a saucer before, but one was ready for her full of warm milk, and instinct took her straight to it. Without any lesson from her enraptured mother she lapped until she could lap no more. In her travels the kitten had scaled an aperture between two brick walls not more than two inches apart, and quite 30ft. high, from the ground to the top storey, and had probably crawled many more feet before coming to rest beneath the dormitory floor.