Today is Scout’s first birthday. In anticipation of her birthday celebration, she brought me a squirrel. Perhaps she wants some stew?
Yes, that’s right, Scout is now an official squirrel catcher. She has always been incredibly interested in squirrels. From the first signs of spring last year, when she was still a young puppy, she would chase them aimlessly around the backyard whenever one dared to come to the ground to hunt last year’s pecans. When we moved to the new house, we were really excited about the idea of not having a pecan tree in the backyard. Though I enjoyed the old one immensely, there were pitfalls of having it. Namely, Scout was always barking her head off in the backyard, or worse still, whining with her head leaned back an an ungodly angle, whimpering loudly at them. As if whimpering would bring them down? I know. You can’t explain whimper logic to a dog, though. Also, even though having a fresh supply of pecans at our disposal was really nice a.) Zack and I are really not that into pecans, and b.) those shells kinda hurt during midnight strolls in the backyard/midnight pleading for the puppy to pee so that you can please, please go back inside.
Turns out, squirrels don’t only live where the pecan trees grow. Squirrels are a bonafide city-loving rodent, and they can be found everywhere, including our new backyard.
Also of note: the new house is made of bricks. Not just regular bricks, but very textured bricks. The kind of bricks that, say, a squirrel could cling to. So the squirrels aren’t just on the trees at the new house, but also on the bricks, in the yard, in the roof, and all over the freaking place. There are squirrels everywhere.
So the Friday after Thanksgiving, my family came to my house to celebrate. Because I needed to do the necessary pre-grandmother visit cleaning, which entailed things like doing the weeks of dishes that had piled up while I wasn’t paying attention and more tedious tasks like dusting, I kicked the dog out of the house. I banished her to the backyard and sentenced myself to an entire day of barking: a sacrifice I was willing to make in order that I might score the highest possible grade on the impending Grandmother Report Card.
About 2:oo that afternoon, I poked my head outside to see how Scout was handling herself, and also, to survey the damage. (Scout, though I love her dearly, is a digger. Giant holes in the ground was what I expected to find.) As soon as I stepped out the back door, Scout looked me square in the face and said, “Wait there. Don’t move a muscle, I have something to show you, and you’re going to LOVE it.” Interested in what this dog could have possibly done to illicit such a sentence, I did exactly that. She turned around, disappeared into the shrubs (read: jungle of foliage) and re-emerged with a stiff squirrel in her mouth. She proudly set the rigor mortised rodent down at my feet, and said, “TA DAH!”
Ta dah, I thought. Hmph. Not exactly what I expected. I promptly commanded her to STEP AWAY FROM THE RODENT, and then I did what any good, almost-25-year-old, independent, married woman would have done. I called my dad.
“DAD. SCOUT KILLED A SQUIRREL AND IT IS STIFF AND WHAT DO I DO?” My question was met with much laughter on the other end of the phone. Apparently, dad didn’t think that the dead squirrel was such a big deal. He merely congratulated Scout on finally accomplishing her life long dream of catching herself a squirrel. “DO I HAVE A KILLER ON MY HANDS?” I calmly asked my father, who was still chuckling. We discussed that the rodent hadn’t been gutted, which is what our old family cat, Tigger, used to do when he caught a mouse or a baby bunny. Scout seemed to have only wanted to play with the squirrel who died of what I could only assume to be blunt force trauma to the head. After the laughter stopped, he asked me what it was that I needed to know. ”WHAT DO I DO WITH A DEAD SQUIRREL?” was right at the top of my list of Questions I Need Answered. Dad replied that a trash can would be an appropriate way to dispose of the newly fallen. Trash cans, I thought, we have some of those. Got it. So I got off the phone, tried to get out the back gate which had been previously secured by Zack, a man who thinks that gates clearly have no purpose and should be shut with such efficient locking systems that they may never be opened again. I’m not beyond jumping a fence or two, but trying to jump a fence while trying fiercely to avoid any and all possible skin-to-fur contact with stiff rodent with a long tail is kind of difficult to do. I was forced to walk the dead squirrel through the house, out the front door, and around to the trash cans. I was not really happy about that. Dead things don’t freak me out that much. I can kill a bug or a snake with great efficiency. Perhaps, though, my microbiological learnings of this semester got the best of me, because I was terrified of contracting Squirrel Fever from that dumb thing.
So anyway, that brings us to yesterday. I stepped outside to let Scout in the house last night as the sun was setting, and Scout looked at me again, and was like, “OKAY. We are going to try this again.” Then she turned tail, ducked into the bushes, and reemerged with yet another dead squirrel.
Awesome. So she’s a serial killer now.
When Zack got home, I said, “Hey. Scout killed another squirrel, and I left this one in the back yard for you to tend to.”
“Another squirrel?” He asked.
“Yes, she killed her first one Friday after Thanksgiving.”
“You didn’t tell me about that.”
Whoops. I guess that’s cause I called dad instead? I guess that’s cause I was working on Acing the Grandma Test? I guess WHO CARES WHY, PLEASE DEAL WITH DECAYING RODENT?
In the end, Zack didn’t react the same way I did. Whereas I was concerned with Scout’s need for blood, with her Dexterish desires, Zack had a different thought on the subject. ”Cool,” he said, “maybe if she kills them all, she won’t always be barking her head off every time she’s in the back yard.”
Though it’s not probable, maybe, just maybe, it’s possible for Scout to pick off every single one of those bushy tailed pesks. But If she does, here’s my questions: are you going to be the one to throw them all away?
