By The Campfire

May 23, 2008

Lightning hit the tall pine in our backyard, blowing out the bark down the side like a fat man ripping a cheap shirt. The big tree slowly died. The squirrels didn’t care. It was nothing but a ladder to them. They started caring yesterday.

We called a crew of tree cutters and with Stihl’s in hand they cut down the pine’s corpse with several other semi-damaged trees that were leaning toward our home from previous wind damage. We left the healthy timber, but with hurricane season bearing down, we cleared the trouble before one of the gnarled, 100-footers randomly sliced the corner off of our bedroom like a reckless kid carving a birthday cake with a 2x4.

Squirrels scampered at the perimeter of our yard, cocking and spasming on the fence in horror, their faces pursed and puckered into expressions that were either disgust, shock, or anger. When the cutting was finished, the squirrels wandered around their former fiefdom, rooting around like tornado victims searching for their possessions in the flattened debris. Now and then, a squirrel would look up at us and snarl. I knew this offense against them would not go unpunished.

Over the years, squirrels have chewed their way into our attic, to be expensively caught and extracted like political prisoners by pest experts. We didn’t kill them. We captured them in little cages on their way out through the holes to gather food. We relocated them to the woods, thinking we were being humane by not executing them. They saw this as a grave injustice and started keeping score by chewing anything that would fit in their mouths.

One Christmas, I had strung lights on the deck. Rudy and I watched on a December afternoon as a squirrel hopped up on the deck rail and carefully selected a multicolored light to nibble, thinking it was a glowing nut. His own glowing nuts were visible when he sunk his squirrelly incisors into the cord. SMACK! A tiny puff of smoke rose over the animal like a halo and the bristly little 3rd cousin to a rat was knocked backward off the deck and to the ground 12 feet below.

Rudy saw the entire episode and curled his dog lips in a moment of infamous pleasure. Jack Russell’s are as territorial as Fidel Castro was in the 1960’s, but a lot less hairy. The squirrels, by their mere presence, have tortured him for years. Watching his enemy ride the lightning was payback. He has chased them with focused diligence, but never caught one. They prance and preen in front of the window while he makes sounds like someone choking an American Idol contestant with a piano cord.

The squirrels were patient, however, and devious and conniving and several other words Rudy would use if dogs could curse. Unlike the full-out-attack mockingbirds from a few stories ago, the squirrels would gather in small meetings and plan sneaky terrorist chewings and tauntings. Then the trees came down.

When the work was finished, Rudy stood in the middle of the clearing, his head high, and his neck stern, muscles rigid, his chest swollen with challenge. Slowly he turned in a circle and eyed each of his nemesis. They perched in the shadows, watching him.

The implication was obvious. With no close trees, Rudy held the advantage, as that was their vertical escape route. He has slammed his dog bark into tree bark many times on the heels of a squirrel darting up a tree to safety.

In Rudy’s face the truth creased his snout, however. The squirrels were just biding their time, planning, waiting. The battle might be won for today, but the war with the squirrels is not over.

He crunched an acorn below his foot, grinding it into the turf. His enemies have buried millions of acorns, nuts, berries and seeds on the contested ground. Soon, new trees will sprout; new escapes will grow.

Rudy looked at me, dropping his head with the realization that neither his life nor mine would last to beat them. One lone squirrel, the big one we call Conan, edged into a long limb over Rudy’s head and dropped an acorn. Rudy watched it bounce, and there was a faint chuckling sound from the trees. It has started again. The future belongs to the squirrels from hell.

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