Squirrelly

Once In The Spring and Once In The Early Fall

I talked to Ursula many times over the next couple of weeks.  She was always outside working in her gardens.  She planted a wide assortment of flowers and even had a small vegetable patch, even though it was quite late in the season to be planting corn, I thought.  Somehow, the topic always drifted back to squirrels.  She was seeing them, she said.  There were several nests in the trees across the street.  She seemed to know a lot about them.

“Squirrels can breed twice a year, can you imagine?  Once in the spring and once in the early fall, each time have two pups.  You know what that means?”  She topped off my ice tea and sat down next to me on her front porch.  I shook my head.  

“They breed  exponentially.  One has four babies.  Each of those babies has four babies.  Next thing you know, the whole world is over run.  That’s what they are working on.  It’s like the Black Death with the rats.”  

I couldn’t really see how it was like the Black Death, but she continued before I could ask.  “There are more animals in the order rodenta than any other mammalian order.  Did you know that?  There simply doesn’t seem to be an end to it.”

Neither did there seem to be an end to Ursula’s disturbing squirrel factoids.  And strange as it may sound, the more time I spent listening to Ursula rail against the squirrel threat, the more I seemed to notice them myself.  Several of them frequented the trees in my yard.  In the mornings or early evening, I would sometimes see them scurrying across the grass of the yards in rapid zigzags.  I tried to study them for signs of malcontent, decipher reasons to be concerned in their chattering and swishing tails.  Their beady dark eyes, located high on their little skulls, were at once menacing and vacant.  Well, not really vacant, it was something more than that.   There was some sort of alien squirrelly sense of self and self preservation.

Sometimes, this squirrel mentality struck me as so utterly alien that to ascribe to it any sort of human motivation was absolute foolishness, but increasingly often, I had to admit, the squirrel did indeed seem to harbor some dark agenda in their walnut sized brains.  Perhaps their outward skittishness was just a instinctual deception while they truly plotted to take over the neighborhood.  

Just to be safe, I started with spreading cayenne pepper in my flower beds and around the trucks of the trees in the backyard, and I wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood that Ursula’s warnings had gotten to.  I noticed that more and more metal guards circled the trunks of trees and more people were trying to surround their vegetable patches with chicken wire.  Others, their faces stern, bought live-traps from Home Depot and hauled their unfortunate victims away to wooded truck stops outside of town.  Others talked of employing poisons or faux birds to repel the vile little monsters.

Yet sadly, the squirrels seemed to care very little for our preparations and defenses.  They still came and went as they pleased, swishing their tales in immunity to our efforts.  The problem was simply too big to be taken on one yard at a time.  It needed to be addressed in a unified front, until it was, all of our hard work would be only for show.  Ursula didn’t let it get her down though and never seemed to waver from her anti-squirrel message.  Ursula had faith.  She just fortified her chicken wire perimeter, poured another round of iced tea, and waited for her moment.  

She didn’t need to wait long. 

Carlton Wong, the president of the neighborhood association, found himself named as a defendant in a lobbying scandal in the state legislature and decided to take an extended vacation in an unnamed Latin American country, leaving his seat open.  Ursula wasted no time in stepping into his position. 

The squirrel population seemed to sense the change in political climate.  They waged a series of lightning raids against any bird feeder not properly defended.   Some people said that they were simply attempting to store up as much food as possible for winter, but it wasn’t long before we got their message loud and clear.  

Ursula had been taking her evening walk that Saturday afternoon.  She was crossing Branton Street, when she saw the squirrel.  It popped out from under a parked car and stood there on the edge of the street, just staring at her with those black eyes, his maw twitching and tail flicking.  Ursula kept walking closer to the squirrel, keeping her eyes trained on it.  She never noticed the on-coming car coming up the street.  But the squirrel did.  In a lightning movement, the tiny rodent broke eye-contact with Ursula and darted back underneath the parked car to come out the other side and right in front of the auto moving into the intersection.   

The car’s brakes squealed as the driver swerved to miss the squirrel.  The squirrel waited until the last possible moment and then darted between the encroaching cars tires and away into the shrubbery on the other side of the street.  The car, out of control at this point, launched up on the curb and if Ursula had not dove into a juniper bush, she would have certainly been struck. 

And as she lay there in the juniper bush, her arm throbbing from the fall, she looked out over the street, to see the squirrel again looking back at her.  His dark eyes eerily stared at her and he flicked his tail in disappointment.  He clicked and chirped dejectedly once, and darted up the trunk of a nearby oak tree.