by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 20, 2008

SQUIRREL

Out in the yard, framed by the window next to my desk, is a three-pronged maple tree, a trident of wood about 50 to 60 years old and thirty feet tall. When I look at it I see at least a good full cord of wood that would thrill a stove, but right now the squirrels interest me most. Two squirrels use the tree regularly. They've been foraging steadily this last month, moving through the fallen leaves around the tree like electrons through a cloud chamber, leaving faint trails flagged by a twitching gray exclamatory tail. (More on the tail in a moment.) They've been meanderingly industrious, pausing often to play but never really abandoning their attack on the stinginess of the coming winter.

The tail. These two have plush tails, handsome tails, a spectrum of gray from dark gray shoots near the core of the tail to pearl gray tips, like a plume of woodsmoke on a cold October day. The tail seems to have life of its own, sometimes thoroughly erect like the flag on a mailbox, at other times whimsically undulating, like a feather-boa shaken out a window. It metronomes, points, see-saws, gavels, gesturing out whatever passes for a passing thought in a squirrel.

The other day they chased each other up and down the maple for at least ten minutes, the scratching scuttle of their claws mixed with their cheeps and chittering. They moved up and down the three main trunks, along the chainlink fence around the yard, over the garbage cans, through the dry brocade of dead leaves, back up the trunks - some squirrel version of "tag," though "it-ness" changed constantly, each squirrel taking turns being both pursued and pursuer. During this frantic gamboling they paused occasionally to cart a seed or an acorn up to their nests in the branches, then fast-forwarded the Keystone chase as if all creation had been waiting for them. At times they moved so fast I couldn't see them, their gray pelts blending with the maple's gray bark, descending from the upper part of the tree in a scattering spiral that brought them into view, then out of view, like a coin in the hand of a good magician. Then back to foraging, their nose flickering like some geiger counter attuned to the radiation of food.

It may not be the same two squirrels I see each time, but there are always two, and so I make them the same. I have written this gray tail of a talk much as they have worked, some times having the words just spiral down the trunk of my brain in a flashy descent, at other times picking through various dead leaves to find a husk redolent of food, stored away in some forgotten sentence. And as for winter: I am pulling my skin in around me just as tightly as they are, cheeping and jabbering until the snow slows the blood, even then pushing out occasionally to taste the saved vittle and catch the cold that affirms the contained warmth under the skin, underlines the brain poking through waste to find what feeds.

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