Chapter 11 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

Squirrel Orphans

Catching up to my brother Jerry as we walked home from elementary school one rainy spring day, he was standing under a huge maple tree looking up at something, and as I drew near I could see two baby squirrels climbing down towards him. We ran home to tell our mother. Jerry said that they must be hungry orphans as they were holding their stomachs from hunger. (I don’t remember seeing this, but they must have been hungry if there wasn’t a sign of parent squirrels nearby… and even at a young age, wild animals won’t approach people except in dire necessity.)

Mom got a cardboard box, some food, and a pair of leather gloves, and followed us out to the nearby tree. It took very little coaxing to get the hungry babies to trust us enough. Soon they were home, and my mother was on the phone to the Science Museum again to find out the recipe for feeding young squirrels.

My mother hated slurping noises. If everyone has a number one pet-peeve, that was hers. If you slurped your hot chocolate in her presence, that would be the first and last time you did. The reason I mention this is that we got a laugh out of the way in which they gave advice on how to feed these squirrels. We were to warm some evaporated milk, then place in it pieces of bread. The squirrels would pickup the soggy bread and slurp out the milk, and slurp they did… Nice and loud! Jerry and I looked at each other trying not to grin, but reading each others thoughts, and then we turned in my mother’s direction to see her reaction to the noise. No reaction. We had to say it. “Mummy! You hate that noise. Doesn’t it bother you?” …and we both didn’t wait for an answer but started laughing hysterically. My mother wasn’t going to get mad at the squirrels, and she kind of smiled and said as how they needed to get the milk that way as they wouldn’t know how to slurp it out of a dish. She really didn’t mind it. It taught me something. It’s not so much the noise, but who’s making it. It is good manners when you know better and don’t slurp, and the other way around is bad manners, but when it’s innocent animals making that exact same irritating noise, it didn’t hit a raw nerve with our mother. Interesting.

There were birches growing over the area where our parents and visitors parked the cars. They were listing more towards the ground each year, and should be removed anyway. Mom sawed off one that was most in the way, and brought it into the dining room the same day we brought in the squirrels. She was always doing little nature projects, the last one was making baskets out of willow branches. She got her willow basket and lined it with some soft shredded rags, hung it from a branch of the birch tree which she had erected, much like an ornament on a needle-free Christmas tree. In this “nest” she placed the baby squirrels after their hunger was satisfied. They felt at home immediately and disappeared into the rags for a well needed sleep. Several days later, the catkins that bloom from live birches were blooming early from the branches of the birch in our dining room. Later we noticed a fine powdery yellow dust from the pollen released from the catkins. I guess Mom didn’t think the tree would develop them. She hadn’t put it in water or otherwise tried to keep the tree alive.

The squirrels adjusted to their new home very quickly. They enjoyed playing and being played with. They’d jump from the tree to anyone’s shoulder as they passed through the dining room. They were more amusing than monkeys in a zoo. They loved cuddling down inside our sweaters or in a coat pocket. We didn’t dare take them outside, for fear they’d get “lost”, but would tote them around the house. They got so they could leap clear across the dining room and land on a startled visitor’s shoulder. After awhile they poked around the house looking for other places to sleep than the willow basket nest. We would end up searching all the closets, coat pockets hanging in the hall, and finally after almost giving up, and just waiting for them to come out when they got hungry, we’d find them in the bottom of a cupboard someone left slightly open, or in an old lined boot.

I was terribly upset when my mother announced that we had to return them to the wild. We moaned and groaned, but was careful not to talk back to my mother. She tried to tell us that they would be happier with their freedom. I was afraid something would catch them… they didn’t have parents to teach them what to watch out for.

I had a tree house in an oak tree that technically was on Hall’s land. I don’t know who tore it down once, but it made me so upset and angry that I marched up to the hardware store, got more nails, got the wood I needed to repair it, and rebuilt it in a day. It was a simple boards-between-two-branches kind of tree-house, though I’d found some corrugated tin for a roof. In my imagination it was a castle. I had a rope to shinny down real fast if I needed to, but climbed the tree to the tree house. I had many picnic lunches up there, looking down at Tomato Hill and Hall’s fields, and let my imagination go, dreaming about who knows what, while patient Jeanie would be laying on the ground below awaiting my descent. The tree house was mine, I’d made it myself… but it wasn’t as protected as our home, and when my mother suggested I take the squirrels up to the tree house, I said that I couldn’t keep them in… there’s no walls. “But,” Mom said, “it will be a natural place for them to stay until they get acclimated back to nature. I’m sure they’ll stay awhile, especially if you feed them up there”

I tearfully brought them up to my tree house. I hardly had them up the tree and they began to climb all over. I got out their food, hoping they’d settle down to eat, and want to stay put. One ate a little, and then scrambled along the branches like a trapeze artist, jumping from one branch to another. “Come back,” I yelled, while the other followed. “Stay here!” It was impossible to go out to the ends of the branches to get them. I tried to watch to see where they were going. One disappeared completely. I was angry and scared. They wouldn’t listen, and were going to get lost, I was sure of it. After an hour of waiting for them to return, I got down from the tree and went down to the house to let my mother know.

“They’ll be back,” Mom said. “They are wild, and want to explore. I’m sure when you go back up tomorrow to bring them food, they will come in to eat.”

The next day I brought up their food, and only one squirrel was there. I was sure something terrible had happened to the other one. I tried to lure in that one by holding out the food to it, and he wouldn’t even come near me. I felt that Mom was wrong. We no longer had our funny monkey-like squirrels. I left some food for them to come in and eat while I was gone. Something ate it. When I went to the tree house from then on, I always was on the look out for our squirrels, but never saw them again. There still were grown up squirrels on the big trees along Williams Court, but I didn’t think they were ours, as it just seemed like they should remember us and somehow let us know that they were there and they were alright. My mother said that they would be much happier wild and free. I couldn’t understand that, as I never saw two happier animals in my life, but I couldn’t deny them their freedom. I got a vicarious thrill out of watching wild squirrels run though a network of high tree branches, gauging how far out they could travel on a tender limb, and how far to jump to another, with less than a split second of thought. As an older woman looking back, I’m sure those squirrels did live, as there weren’t many predators in the area I lived, and I’ve since released many animals into the wild, and could see how quickly they instinctively took to the life they were meant to live. Now I would rather see a wild animal that would probably live less long than one in captivity, as I feel it’s like imprisoning an innocent being. Freedom is living, but being in a cage is merely existing. I rarely go to zoos because of that.