Epilogue: Squirrels Don’t Bounce

I was out working on the car on Sunday (changing the fuel filter, air filter, breather valve, cleaning) with David Bowie’s Changes One playing on the record player. Everything was going smoothly until some squirrels who were rather annoyed by the proximity of my work and the apple tree started barking at me. Not barking like a dog but a repetitive angry chatter that's quite annoying. It's particularly annoying for someone who has had to put up with those little fuckers in the woods while hunting. Because, when one stops and takes a break at the top of say, a huge ridge that was on your compass bearing the squirrels get pissed and try to “annoy you” out of their territory by raising an unholy racket. This generally brings forth an extreme road rage type anger with no outlet because, if you shoot it the deer/elk/etc that you are actually hunting for will no longer be around.
Anyways, so these two fat squirrels are barking at me and completely ruining my bitchin’ sing along to Suffragette City. I figured since they wanted the apples so badly I would give them what they desired. After finding a few of the apples that hadn’t turned to mush yet I took aim and let a few fly, missing by a few feet. I managed to shut them up and went about my business. I noticed a while later a squirrel was in down in the driveway eating part of one of the apples that had exploded on the tree trunk. He was lying really low to the ground so I went to investigate.

Well it turns out that Scootsie the Squirrel did in fact injure him/herself when it fell out of the tree back in September . I walked up to it and it dragged itself out of the driveway about 5 feet and being the deductive genius that I am, I surmised that it must have broken its back as it's back legs were not working. I kicked the apple chunk over to it and went back to work. 15 minutes later I look up and it is back in the driveway where the apple was chewing on a stick. I walked over to it and squatted down with about 3 feet between us. It didn’t even flinch so I poked it with a stick and still nothing. After much deliberation over the current quality of life it was living vs. slow starvation when the apples ran out I decided to call in “a guy” to “take care of things”.

RIP Scootsie 200_ - 2006

/I was rather amazed at how many results came up for Dead Squirrel on Google Image Search. Not really worth looking.