A Squirrelly Situation Read online

  “I certainly hope so. Let us head back. I think that’s enough excitement for one day.” He held out his hand, and I took it. His hand was so big, it completely enclosed mine. My legs slowly stopped trembling. We walked all the way home like that.

  That night my father announced at dinner that one of the neighbor’s dogs had chased a feral hog.

  “Oh!” I said without thinking. “That must—”

  Granddaddy cleared his throat. He shook his head the tiniest bit in warning, and I clamped my mouth shut.

  “Yes?” said Mother. “‘That must’ what?”

  I suddenly realized that if my parents had known we’d been in danger from the hog, they’d never let me go exploring with Granddaddy ever again. Heck, they’d never let me out of my room ever again. What an idiot I was!

  “Oh, nothing,” I muttered. “I was thinking of, uh, something else.”

  This earned me a round of funny looks from everyone at the table except Granddaddy, who calmly chewed his way through his steak. Then Father went on to explain that the hog had ripped the dog’s ear open. The neighbor was unhappy because not only had all that ham and bacon gotten away, he’d had to pay Dr. Pritzker—the animal doctor—to sew the ear back together.

  Too bad. I’d watched the doctor sew a ripped ear before. I would have done it for free, just to get the practice.

  5

  Thud and Fluffy grew quickly. As soon as they were big enough to get out of the basket, they took to tumbling and crawling and batting at each other all across the kitchen floor. I would have thought Viola would have had a fit at the thought of a squirrel in her domain, but her love of Idabelle and Thud was so great that it spilled over onto Fluffy as a form of, well, if not exactly love, at least some tolerance.

  Soon Fluffy was big enough to eat solid food. We gave him tiny bits of dried apple and slices of carrot, which he loved. And, of course, he was nuts about nuts. (Ha!) I gave him one of Mother’s empty spools of thread to gnaw on. It was just the right size. He clutched it in his paws and chewed on it every day. His fur was as soft as Thud’s. If you stroked him gently, his eyes would droop shut with pleasure. After a few minutes he would fall asleep, just like a regular kitten.

  Then the trouble began. As soon as he was strong enough, he started climbing. He’d climb anything, including people. He’d scamper up your legs and arms, leaving a trail of tiny, painful scratches the whole way. This was charming only the first couple of times. He liked to climb as high up in the kitchen as he could get, which I guess is only natural for a tree dweller. He climbed on top of the cabinets, taking in everything below with his shiny black eyes.

  Viola was cooking one afternoon when I walked into the kitchen in search of a glass of lemonade. Fluffy and Thud were tumbling over each other in the corner in a mock battle. I must have startled Fluffy because he suddenly broke it off and sprang onto one of the roller blinds. It rolled up with a loud snap, taking Fluffy up to the ceiling with it. Now it was Viola’s turn to be startled. She screamed approximately like this: “EEEEEEE!”

  This in turn startled me, and I jumped about a mile. And then it was Mother’s turn to be startled, and she came running in from the parlor.

  “What’s wrong?” she cried, no doubt expecting murder and mayhem from the sound of things. She then startled Fluffy, who leaped onto the clock on the wall. The only calm one left in the room was Idabelle, who lazily cocked one eye open to check on her children, then rolled over in her basket and went back to sleep.

  Viola shook her wooden spoon at Fluffy, saying, “You want to end up as squirrel stew? ’Cos I can make that happen, mister.”

  Fluffy sat on top of the kitchen clock and chittered. Mother looked as if she was getting a headache and wisely backed out of the kitchen.

  But Fluffy had discovered a quick and fun and easy way to reach the ceiling via the blinds, and he regularly jumped on them and rode them up. Viola, always busy at the stove, never got completely used to it. She still jumped and threatened him every time, but her screaming got quieter, so there was that.

  Whenever Idabelle and Thud went outside, Fluffy tagged along behind them in the grass. But the first tree they came to, he would shoot up, leaping from branch to branch to keep up with his mother and brother below. Sometimes he scampered along the clothesline off the back porch. You had to admire his acrobatic performance, at least until he stopped to gnaw on the wooden clothespins, and then we had to divert his attention to some other project before Viola or Mother caught him at it.

  We finally had to accept that Fluffy was now very unhappy living at floor level. His days in the basket were over, no matter how much we threatened or encouraged him to stay there.

  “We have to figure something out, Travis, before Viola kills him. And us. And I’m tired of all these scratches all over me.” I showed him my arms. I looked like I’d been dragged sideways through a prickle bush.

  Fluffy looked up as if he knew we were talking about him. His cheeks were overstuffed with pecans, and he looked like he had a bad case of the mumps.

  “But Callie,” Travis said, “look at how cute he is.”

  “I know he’s cute, but we have to make him cute somewhere else so he doesn’t drive everybody crazy. He’s got to quit riding the blinds.”

  “So,” Travis said, “what if we build him a home up high? And a way to get there?”

  Sometimes my little brother surprised me. “What do you have in mind?” I asked. “Some kind of basket? How about a birdhouse?”

  “I was thinking of some kind of hammock.”

  “Really? Made out of what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But let’s go out to the barn, there’s sure to be something there.”

  We scrambled around in the barn, looking at bits of this and scraps of that, until finally we came up with just the right thing: an old piece of canvas that we turned into a tiny hammock. We tacked it up high in the far kitchen corner. He also added a length of slender rope hanging down to act as Fluffy’s own private staircase. Fluffy stopped riding the blinds and scampered up and down the rope instead. He seemed very happy up there, well out of Viola’s way.

  The only trouble was Thud got it into his head one day to follow his brother up to this perch above the cabinets. He made it about halfway before falling back to earth, almost ending up in the soup pot. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, he did make a really loud thud when he landed.) Cats may be good climbers, but squirrels are really good climbers. Viola shrieked at that, too. There was quite a bit of shrieking in the kitchen that summer.

  Then one unfortunate day it was Fluffy’s turn to shriek. Travis went out the back door but didn’t realize Fluffy was following him. The screen door slammed shut on Fluffy’s tail. Fluffy screamed like a screech owl, and I came running. The end of his tail was sticking out sideways at a sickening angle.

  “Oh no!” Travis cried, and scooped him up. Fluffy cried out chip-chip-chip in distress. “Callie, help me, what do we do?”

  I expected Travis to keel over into a faint at any second. (He was prone to that sort of thing whenever an animal was injured.) But there was no visible blood, so he managed to stay upright.

  “Put him in his basket and keep him there. I’ll get the first aid kit.”

  I ran off to the bathroom, where we kept a tin box of bandages and ointments. Living on a farm with lots of animals and machinery, folks were always getting cuts and scrapes that weren’t bad enough to call Dr. Barker, the people doctor. We often had to doctor ourselves.

  I ran back with the box. Travis was petting Fluffy to keep him calm.

  He asked, “Should we take him to the vet, do you think?”

  Dr. Pritzker’s job was to look after cows and horses and valuable farm animals. Sometimes he’d let me follow along after him, and I’d learned a few things along the way.

  “I think I can fix him,” I blurted. Then I thought about it some more. “Probably.”

  “Really? You can do that?”

 
“Well … maybe.” I knelt down and looked at Fluffy’s tail. The good news was that the rest of him looked all right. The bad news was that I was going to have to straighten out the kink. Dr. Pritzker had taught me that with a broken bone it was important to try and put it back where it was supposed to be. In other words, return it to its original position as much as possible. Once you’d done that, you had to hold the bone in place with a splint until it healed.

  Did squirrels have bones in their tails? I didn’t know. But I knew that Idabelle had lots of little bones in her long tail. I’d felt them. She needed her tail for balance, so I figured Fluffy probably did, too.

  “Here comes the hard part,” I said.

  “Uh, what?”

  “I’m going to pull on his tail to straighten it out. He won’t like it one bit. You’ll have to hold him still.”

  “Oh no. Isn’t there another way?”

  “Not unless you want him to spend the rest of his life like that. I mean, he looks pretty strange, but that doesn’t really matter so much. The important thing is that I think his balance will be bad. He might not be able to climb anymore, and that’s no good if you’re a squirrel.”

  “I guess not.” Travis looked downcast. “Do I have to watch? Maybe we could get someone else to hold him.”

  “He’s your pet, you need to hold him. But you don’t have to watch.”

  “Okay.” Travis petted Fluffy, who by now had quieted down.

  I ripped some rolls of gauze into narrow strips for our tiny patient. “All right, hold him tight now. He’s not going to be happy.”

  Travis muttered, “Me neither.” He adjusted his hold and turned his head away.

  I thought, All right, Calpurnia, if you’re going to do it, do it fast. It’ll be easier on all of us. Pull fast and straight. Go on, fast and straight.

  I gently took hold of the end of Fluffy’s tail. Before he could figure out what was going on, I yanked it. I felt and heard a very faint click under my hand as the bone slipped into place. “EEEEEEE!” Fluffy screamed, reminding me a whole lot of Viola. Out of all the many screams I’d heard in the kitchen, this one was the grand prize winner. He thrashed and scratched at Travis, who yelped and let him go. Fluffy ran up the cabinets to the safety of his hammock. His tail looked straight—or at least straighter—as best I could tell. He scolded us at earsplitting volume.

  Viola came running from the pantry. Mother came running from the parlor.

  “I think you did it, Callie!” yelled Travis over the noise.

  “Did what?” cried Mother. We could barely hear her. “What happened? Who’s hurt?” She stared at us wildly, confused that both her children were upright and neither one was bleeding.

  Travis yelled, “Fluffy got hurt, and Callie fixed him.”

  “Then why is it making so much noise? What’s wrong with it? For pity’s sake, make it stop!” She put her hands over her ears. “I can’t hear myself think.”

  “It’s just that the fixing part hurt,” said Travis, “and he’s not happy. I know what he needs.” He went into the pantry for a couple of shelled pecans and then dragged out the stepladder. Fluffy watched all this and got slightly quieter. Travis climbed up the ladder to the hammock and held out a nut. Fluffy grumbled a little longer, then reached for the nut and stuffed it into his cheeks, and the terrible noise suddenly stopped. The kitchen fell silent. Except for the faint crunching of a nut.

  I needed to splint the tail to keep it still, but I couldn’t get near him. Fluffy figured his friends had attacked him for no good reason, and he kept a wary distance. The tail seemed to heal up fine over the next few weeks without splinting. But it took a whole lot of time and a whole lot of nuts for him to forgive me.

  6

  It was the fall, and the beginning of hunting season for Father and Ajax, his prize bird dog. Ajax had finally recovered from getting quilled by a porcupine. Twice. That is to say, he had recovered from his physical wounds. But every time he went out hunting, he spent much of his time looking around scared, as if expecting a porcupine to leap out from behind a bush at any moment. (I guess you’d act the same way too after getting a face full of quills—twice.)

  Anyway, autumn was getting on, and it was time for the Fentress Fall Fair. Every year young people competed for prizes for the best livestock and handicrafts and baked goods. There were prizes for cows and sheep and goats and rabbits; there were prizes for pies and preserves and knitting and tatting. There were prizes for all sorts of things. And this year there was a hunting prize for boys aged ten to fifteen.

  Hunting what? you may ask.

  Answer: Why, hunting squirrels.

  You may wonder why. Part of it was that the squirrel population had taken a sudden jump this year, and they were chewing up the local pecan growers’ nuts at an amazing rate. The growers had banded together and come up with the idea of a squirrel shoot to help save their crops and improve their profits. Part of this was a way for boys to get started in the hunting life without having to face down something big enough to fight back, like, say, a feral hog. Actually there were two prizes up for grabs: one for the most squirrels killed in one day and another for the biggest squirrel overall.

  Travis was deeply offended by this, partly on his own account and partly on Fluffy’s behalf. “Why do they have to kill squirrels?” he said. “Squirrels never hurt anyone.”

  Now, this was perfectly true. I mean, what else could they do besides drop nuts on your head? Chatter you to death? On the other hand, there were some families at the far end of town that would go hungry if they didn’t have a squirrel for the pot. (Travis knew this, but I didn’t see any point in reminding him.) Now he had the perfect excuse to keep Fluffy inside at all times, safe from the line of fire.

  There was a mean boy at school, Woodrow Chadwick, who bragged about what a great shot he was to anybody who would listen.

  “I’m going to win those prizes—both of them—so the rest of you might as well just stay home. Don’t even bother to show up.”

  I didn’t like Woodrow one bit, and he didn’t like me either. But he and my older brother Lamar were friends, so I had to put up with him coming by our house every now and then. Even so, when he visited, he kept his distance from me. You see, I might have … possibly, maybe, mostly accidentally, kind of on purpose, sort of … slugged him. And even if I had done that, it was only because he’d insulted Granddaddy. How could anyone stand for it? This was not permitted.

  Anyway, Woodrow told Lamar he was spending hours practicing with his uncle’s .22 rifle, shooting at old tin cans. I paid him no mind.

  Finally the big day came. A dozen or so boys headed out into the woods at sunrise with their pellet guns and rifles. The rules were that you had to shoot as many squirrels as you could before noon, then bring them in for judging at the cotton gin. The three judges were the postmaster, the grocer, and Dr. Pritzker.

  At high noon, a small crowd watched as the boys came trailing back along Main Street. Some of them hadn’t bagged a single squirrel and looked pretty sheepish. One boy had three, another had five, and Woodrow had six. Ugh. He’d won, just as he’d predicted. It was hard to see a braggart turn out to be right about, well, anything.

  So that part of the contest was over. That part was no problem. The problem was the next part.

  The grocer had brought his scale, and the judges started weighing the squirrels. Most of them were in the range of two pounds or so. They were just getting to Woodrow when up trotted Travis, holding a cardboard box.

  Uh-oh.

  He walked up to the judges and said politely, “I’d like to enter my squirrel in the biggest squirrel category.” He held out the box, which chattered unhappily.

  “What have you got in there, son?” said the grocer.

  “It’s my squirrel, Fluffy.”

  “Sounds like you got a live one in there,” said the postmaster.

  “Yessir. And he’s a pretty big one, too.”

  Woodrow sneered and said, “You can�
�t enter a live squirrel.”

  “Why not?” asked Travis.

  Woodrow and the judges looked taken aback.

  The grocer said, “Well, I, uh … I don’t think the contest is for live ones.”

  “I read the rules,” said Travis. “They don’t say anything about it having to be a dead squirrel. Wouldn’t you rather have a live one, anyway? They’re much nicer, don’t you think?”

  Fluffy squeaked and scratched at the box, clearly agreeing that live squirrels were indeed much nicer than dead ones.

  Dr. Pritzker pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and looked it over. He laughed and said, “The boy’s right, you know. It says right here, ‘prize for the largest squirrel entered.’ It doesn’t say largest dead squirrel entered.” He grinned at Travis. “I say we let him enter.”

  The other two judges hesitated but then nodded in agreement. Woodrow pouted and glared at Travis.

  Good. Anything that made Woodrow pout and glare was fine with me.

  The grocer asked, “How are you going to weigh it, son? We can’t include the weight of the box; that wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Travis, opening the box, “he’s tame, and I put a string around his neck.” He reached in and pulled out Fluffy, petting him to calm him before setting him on the scale. Fluffy looked around, alert but not panicky. He was pretty used to people by then. And Travis was right: A live squirrel was so much nicer than a dead one.

  “Goodness, that is one big specimen. What did you raise it on?”

  “I really didn’t do all that much,” he said modestly. “It was mostly our cat Idabelle who raised him.”

  “Your cat, you say? This here squirrel was raised on cat’s milk?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ll be danged.”

  Fluffy sat on the scale, looking right at home and very cute. You’d have thought he’d been trained for this moment.