Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
The masonry contractor in Glasgow, Kentucky got the call at 6:48 on a Saturday morning.
The homeowner — a widow on Beech Tree Lane named Lorraine Pickett — had heard scratching inside the chimney of her two-story brick farmhouse since Thursday evening. She had assumed, at first, that a bird had come down the flue. By Friday afternoon the sound was lower and more insistent. By Saturday morning it was the unmistakable, exhausted meow of a cat that had been somewhere it could not climb out of for almost two full days.
Dale Hocutt, who has cleaned and lined chimneys in south-central Kentucky for twenty-three years, drove over with a borescope camera, a soft-bristle brush, a sledgehammer he has never used on a job in his life, and his eleven-year-old daughter Bethany, who had begged to come along.
The cat was wedged ninety inches down the flue, in the smoke shelf above the damper, in a brick farmhouse that had not had a working fireplace since the 1990s. He was a small brown-tabby tom with a torn left ear and what looked, on the borescope, like soot-blackened white socks.
Dale named him on the borescope, while he was looking at him.
“Trumpet,” he said to Bethany. “Because the whole house has been a megaphone for him.”
The extraction took ninety-three minutes and involved removing a section of chimney brick from the outside of the house. Mrs. Pickett insisted, twice, on offering to pay for the masonry repair. Dale waved her off. He had been wanting an excuse to teach Bethany the reverse-knock — the technique where you tap a sequence of slow, soft knocks on the chimney wall to give a trapped animal something steady to walk toward, instead of away from.
Trumpet walked toward the knock.
When the last brick came out, Trumpet was sitting on the smoke shelf, covered in soot, both eyes open, looking directly at Dale through the new hole in the wall. He did not try to run. He let Dale reach in with two hands and lift him out, and then he immediately, on the front lawn of a stranger’s house, in the May sunlight, began to purr — loudly enough that Bethany said she could feel it through her shirt.
The vet down the road at Barren County Animal Hospital cleaned Trumpet’s ears, eyes, and nose, gave him fluids, and told the Hocutts what they had already started to know on the drive over.
Trumpet had no microchip. He had no collar. He had a body condition score of three out of nine. He had ash on the roof of his mouth.
He had also, by the time the vet visit ended, climbed into Bethany Hocutt’s lap on the exam-room floor and gone to sleep there, and stayed asleep there for the entire eighteen-minute drive home in the cab of Dale’s pickup.
Mrs. Pickett knitted Trumpet a small charcoal-gray sweater the following week. He wears it on cool evenings. Bethany has not put him down for any period longer than the time it takes her to do her homework.
Dale is going to teach her how to use the borescope this summer.
He says she is, at eleven, already a better masonry contractor than her father was at twenty. 🐾