Last night when my sons and I came home from walking the dog, I spotted something on the lawn. Something brown, moving low in the grass and not very quickly. It was furry and flat and it slithered.
We got a little closer, and with Maggie tugging insistently on her leash, I realized it was a squirrel. It was pulling itself with its front paws and dragging its body and back legs.
“Oh, my God! I think it broke its spine!” I say to the boys. “Look at it!”
I wonder if it fell off the roof or out of the tree. It was on the ground, even with the drip line of the oak. Maybe it jumped from the roof to the tree and underestimated.
When Vincent was still breastfeeding, we would sit out on the front porch in the shade of the large oak and maple trees on the front lawn. From the angle he was in, across my lap he could see the oak tree out his left eye. One day we were sitting there entertained by two squirrels running all around the yard, up the trees, down the trees and around the yard some more. “They must be brothers,” I told Vincent.
Then we heard a plop. We looked and a stunned squirrel shook himself, looked back up the tree and down at the ground in front of him.
“Did you see that?” I asked Vincent. He unlatched and let out a little giggle. He saw it, too. He latched back on and we finished our conversation with our eyes. He smiled up at me. I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen a squirrel fall out of a tree like that. He must have fallen through a hole in the nest. I can’t believe he was all right.” Vincent kept up his end of the conversation by smiling up at me and nursing.
A few minutes later the squirrel got up when its brother in the nest above him came down and ran around the yard as if to say, “You can’t get me!” They returned to their game of tag, up and down the oak tree and then we heard it again. Plop! Vincent saw it the second time, too, out of the edge of his eye. He unlatched and let out a laugh.
But this squirrel, dragging on the lawn. He was not all right. I put Maggie in the house so she wouldn’t attack him and then get counterattacked. At a distance from the squirrel, the boys and I tried to figure out if he broke his spine or his back legs? Did he fall out of the tree or get hit by a car? Somehow he pulled himself up the trunk with his front paws, while the rest of him dragged behind. It took him a long time, with a lot of pauses and squeaks, but he made it up to a branch and stayed there. I thought about the hawks that used to be in the neighborhood. If they hadn’t moved on they would put him out of his misery quickly. But without them….
It wasn’t that long ago that we buried a gerbil. Skye posted obits all around the house. At the top, in Old Gothic font, he wrote DEAD. The rest of it read like an 1800’s obituary, listing the surviving gerbil siblings.
I wonder how he’s going to handle this one? Is he going to make a flyer, find a shoebox, name it posthumously, perhaps?
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