Today is to hit a broken-bat single.
A sort-of week of exciting animal stories wraps up this week (that is, of course, if any of you send any in because I might as well just go ahead and say it--if you send me something I'll probably put it up here because that means I have five extra minutes in my day to spend applying self-tanner than writing here) with Eric Wrisley's sad squirrel story. If it depresses you, just know that my mother has a somewhat similar story involving a bird and a fireplace that had a happier ending.
THE LONESOME DEATH OF SQUIRREL NUTKIN
(or, Things Beatrix Potter Never Told You)
In Autumn, when the leaves were ripe, my phone
rang.
"Hello?"
"I'm glad you're home, I need a guy."
When I hear my friend Hound Dog say this, I think it
must be one of two things: either he needs help moving
something heavy, or he's finally decided to come out.
I'm lazy, and so I sort of hope it's the latter. At
least that won't involve me. My silence conveys this.
"Not like that, I need you to come over and help me
catch a squirrel in the basement. Just come over."
It's a good thing that I got there when I did. When
I arrived, I took note of the following items on the
kitchen table: 12-gauge shotgun shell, cut apart; the
deer slug next to it; an old "Wrist Rocket" slingshot;
a wire coat hanger; a well-thumbed copy of "Catcher in
the Rye" (notable, but irrelevant to this story).
Hound Dog is squatting on the floor, sharpening a
dowel rod with a cheap kitchen knife.
As he led me down the basement stairs, he explained
that a squirrel had wedged itself into a small crevice
on the side of the furnace and was apparently lodged
there. He couldn't go any further up, and he wouldn't
go back down where the flames were. (In case you
don't know, a frightened squirrel screams like a 3rd
grade girl at a slumber party, so the furnace had to
be shut off to keep Nutkin quiet.)
First, Hound Dog thought he could force the squirrel
down by tapping its face with the dowel rod. When
that didn't work, he decided to sharpen the stick and
kill the squirrel.
A few test pokes determined that squirrel skin is
tougher than you'd think. I suggested that the only
way to safely and humanely kill it with the stick
would be to use the slingshot to shoot it directly
through its eye, hopefully into its brain. A
squirrel's eye is a moving target measuring
approximately 1.5 centimeters across. And it
occasionally blinks. While a direct hit to the brain
is likely the most humane death, the risk of injury to
both hunter and prey is infinitely more likely.
Hound Dog's variation on this theme involved using
the slingshot with the deer slug, Nutkin's entire head
being the target.
"What will you do," I asked, "when the slug
ricochets back out and creams through your own head?"
As I mentioned, it's a good thing I got there when I
did. "You'd have better odds in Vegas at the roulette
wheel, eh?"
"There's not roulette wheel in my furnace, it's a
squirrel. Lokk, if you're not going to help... Just
give me the stick."
"I'd feel a lot better about a catch and release
program", I said, "We could let it go at the park. He
doesn't deserve to die. He's learned his lesson -- he
won't come back." I went upstairs to work on my "Free
Squirrel Nutkin" T-shirt, and ultimately, reason won
out.
Combining my knowledge of Native American fish traps
and asking, "What would MacGyver do?" I constructed a
trap made of a box that once held a lava lamp, the top
half of a milk jug, and duct tape. The milk jug is
placed inverted in the top of the box, creating a cone
that the squirrel can easily get into, but less easily
out of. That's what MacGyver would do.
The trouble was that the squirrel was stuck in such
a way that we couldn't get him to move into the trap
without opening the cover of the furnace. Perhaps if
we could force him up to the top, or down to the
bottom. We poked his nose. We tapped his tail. We
prodded his paws. In the end, he slid down to the
bottom of the furnace.
You can call it circumstance, call it fate, call it
karma, call it what you will, but at the same time the
squirrel slid down, the furnace kicked on.
Two-and-a-half seconds later, Nutkin was hopping
through the flames, his once bushy tail smoking and
shriveling. No matter how fast you shut off the
furnace, it isn't fast enough to keep the stench of
burnt squirrel tail from being blown throughout the
entire house.
It was at this point that Hound Dog's wife decided
to go visit her mother, with the admonition, "When I
come home, it better not smell like this!" She has no
appreciation for the fine art of MacGyver-style rodent
traps.
As the door slammed, we realized that Squirrel
Nutkin had stopped climbing around, and was staring at
us. Davey Crockett used to claim he could stare
raccoons and possums out of trees, and maybe it would
work with a squirrel. I stared hard, Hound Dog stared
hard. We stared for what must have been 5 minutes
before we gave up. Had we been stared down by a
squirrel? After another 5 minutes, we saw that he
still wasn't moving. His eyes weren't moving, he
wasn't breathing, he was, in fact, quite dead.
When we opened the side of the furnace, we saw that
his front paws were sitting on top of a switch,
completing the circuit. I think a person would only
get a shock from touching the contacts. For a
squirrel it proved too much. He had gone to the great
Oak Tree in the sky. This looks like the end of the
story; but it isn't.
We put his body into the milk jug trap and left it
at the curb for the garbage man. And that's all there
was to Squirrel Nutkin.