Swish Your Bushy Tail
By David Gaskill
Squirrels. We've always had lots of the feisty little critters on our property. They love to nest in our giant Norway spruces and silver maples and test their iron-jawed mettle on the iron-shelled produce from the black walnut trees out back. Mostly they are a happy, normal bunch of extroverts, squabbling with one another, digging holes in the lawn and mating like mad in May.
But one spring a few years ago, a strange, larger squirrel appeared on the scene (I'm not making this up). It was obvious from the size that he was male, but what made him distinctive was his head. It was oddly shaped -- unusually oblong and a little too big for his wiry, improbably lanky body. The other squirrels didn't like him. They would move warily away whenever he came near. To the best of my knowledge, he never found a mate.
I think it was something in his genes, rather than his appearance, that separated him from his peers. In fact, judging by his talky unpredictability and the suddenness of his actions, he would have been the Jar Jar Binks of Planet Squirrel if a sci-fi movie had been made about his life.
I named him Crazy.
The chief difference from the "Star Wars" character, however, was that Crazy was fearless. If he was foraging in the front yard and I was on my way to the mailbox, Crazy wouldn't stop what he was doing and scramble up the nearest tree like any sensible, human-respecting squirrel. Oh, no -- he would sit back on his haunches, glare menacingly and look me straight in the eye as if to say, "I'm here in this spot and I'm not moving from this spot and what are you gonna do about it, Sport?" That made me nervous enough to give him a wide berth.
Our cat, a fairly timorous brindle, tried stalking Crazy one day. But did that nutter even flinch? No way. He positioned himself on a tree trunk just a couple of feet from the ground, easily within claw-reach, and made teethy feints and threatening chitters until the cat -- ultimately intimidated -- decided to slink away. And my wife, who likes to read at our shady picnic table in summer, felt uncomfortable enough to come inside whenever Crazy was around.
What was wrong with Crazy? We're pretty sure it wasn't rabies. He never appeared sick. He didn't go in for the unprovoked attack or taunt us by leaving white spittle on an unsuspecting screen door handle. No, he was just -- off. And in his offness he was determined to live his life the way he wanted to, even if it meant flouting all the rules of rodentdom. Gradually, because of his independence of spirit in the face of obvious handicaps, I began to respect him.
But as summer moved into fall, I felt increasingly certain that Crazy couldn't last. Yeah, I knew he was gathering nuts and burying them like all the other grays. But did he know enough to fashion a winter abode for himself? And what about other predators? I'd never seen him back down, and there were night hunters and break-of-dawn scavengers in the area -- you know, raccoons, hawks, motorcyclists -- even the nasty opossum or two.
Sure enough, one morning in late autumn when I went to retrieve the mail, I thought I spotted something lumpish lying very still beneath one of our quince bushes. I looked closely. It was Crazy. Most of him was gone -- just his weirdly shaped head, his tail and a few scraps of fur were all that remained. Instantly, I ran for the house. "Somebody got Crazy!" I breathlessly told my wife. Later, I shoveled the remains into a shallow grave beside a massive black walnut, stark as a crucifix, that stretched its branches over a far corner in the lower yard.
And now the pundits report that Rick Santorum, former Pennsylvania senator and Bushophile who, like ex-Allentown Mayor Roy Afflerbach, so much resembles our late rogue squirrel, is making noises about running for president. That, in my book, is just plain Crazy.
