The Slice: One of those stories that screams for Rod Serling

Baby Kitty was upset.

And after the 13-year-old cat woke him in the middle of the night, Dexter DuPont was, too. “It sounded like someone was trying to break in,” he said.

The North Side retiree soon realized he was faced with a problem of a different feather.

An owl had plunged down the chimney of his little house next to Audubon Park. And now it was kicking up a fuss in the closed, cool fireplace.

Baby Kitty urged DuPont to do something.

But this wasn’t the kind of thing that happens every day.

If DuPont’s name looks familiar, it might be because he was featured in The Slice back in May. The onetime actor with adult children in this area played a backwoods angel in one of my favorite episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”

So you can guess what theme music occurred to DuPont as he and Baby Kitty confronted the winged home invasion last week.

DuPont and his stressed-out cat were traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of owl.

At first the agitated, foot-tall bird rattled around behind the fireplace’s screen and glass doors. But eventually it settled down on a piece of wood. The brown and gray owl used that as a perch as it surveyed its forlorn situation with wide eyes.

DuPont assumed there was zero chance it could get out the same way it had come in.

So he called the police. One thing led to another and, several hours later, a volunteer from the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council arrived.

Art Meikel, a retired Air Force pilot, sized up the predicament and calmly went to work.

“He was great,” DuPont said later.

The two of them managed to get the animal into a net, and then out of the house.

One bird of prey successfully extracted.

After a moment to reconnoiter, the owl lifted itself off the ground and flew away. It seemed fine.

There’s a signpost up ahead – your next stop, freedom.

Today’s Slice question: What do people who have been in the restaurant business in Spokane think when they hear someone with zero experience talk about how much fun it would be to open a restaurant?