PREY-DRIVE

My career choice of working at the utility company has at least given me this: the blazing ability to dig squirrel graves. Lickety-split, it's dug and done.

I don't know whether to be (somewhat) angry at my boys or proud of them. I think I'm leaning towards the former but, what the hell, they're dogs. They are hunters. They are hardwired with a prey drive. Today, it reared its head.

They were outside and I wandered outside to have a smoke and drink some coffee and call my friend, all while enjoying the beautiful weather. I walked outside and Lou and Ollie ran over to me, tails wagging, dog smiles on their faces. I saw the raquetball on the ground, so I picked it up and faked a throw at the tree and waited for Lou to realize that I hadn't thrown the ball. (Oliver's eyes, on the other hand, had not strayed from the little blue target. He regarded it with a look of Okay, jackass, I know you still have it. Are you going to throw the damned thing or should we maybe just wait for a new ball at Christmas?) Lou turned to me, then, and I chucked the ball up in the air--straight up--as high as I could.

Lou looked the opposite way until, hearing it strike the ground, he turned around and streaked for the ball. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something greenish-yellow fall from the tree and hit the ground, about ten, fifteen feet from Lou and Oliver. I had time to think to myself, Huh, was a tennis ball stuck up in the tree, too? before something else plummeted from the branches, about twenty feet up. The brown object hit the ground and twisted and I realized it was a squirrel.

Lou abandoned all thoughts of the raquetball and spun on a dime to close the distance before the squirrel could shake off the shock of falling--relatively-speaking--twenty stories. It wasn't even close. Before I could get to Lou and Ollie, they'd batted the rodent to the ground and had sunk their teeth into its side. "Back!" I shouted. Lou turned to me, the squirrel dangling from the side of his mouth and shook it like a bag of popcorn. The squirrel flopped like a wet noodle.

Eventually I got the dogs by their collars and pulled them from their quarry. As I held them back, I looked at the squirrel. His eyes were wide open and he was breathing rapidly. He tried to gain his feet and get away, but the commands weren't making it from his brain to his legs. His back left leg came into my sight and I saw that his inner thigh and groin area had been torn into flaps of furry red. His grayish muscle poked from a gash near his tail. The kid wasn't looking too good, and I knew what I'd probably have to do.

First thing, though, was to get the boys inside so that I could deal with the situation in a more-subdued atmosphere.

I came back out and sat down in the chair and regarded the unfortunate little guy. His respiration was shallow and quick and his equalibrium was fucked. I was hoping that he was simply stunned, that the wound on his leg would heal over time, that my dogs had not become cold-blooded...um, dogs. It was not to be. As I watched, the squirrel regained his feet and staggered over to the old oak tree. Though he was walking like a drunk, I was hoping that he wasn't too messed up. Though his leg was fucked up and I figured his back might be broken, I was silently cheering him on. I really did not want to have to finish him off.

Aloud, I said, "Come on, kid, you can do it." And he nearly did. With only one working hind leg, he started up the tree and headed for the nook. Right before the nook, he lost momentum. His left rear leg slipped and he was left clinging to the gray-brown bark with one front paw. He reminded me of a cliff-climber, all swaying in the moutain breeze, one handhold the only thing preventing certain death. The kid didn't make it. The bark broke and he fell backwards, doing a lazy backflip before his head connected hard with a gnarled old root. If he looked like he was in bad shape previously, this was the icing on the cake. He lay in a psuedo-fetal position, breathing shallowly, nothing moving but his eyes and his whiskers and his side...barely.

Enough.

Saying a quick silent prayer and telling him aloud that I was sorry, I scooped him up in a flat shovel and walked him over to a bush near the back fenceline. I, for whatever reason, didn't want anyone to see what I needed to do. His body twisted unnaturally (broken back) as I slid him off the shovel underneath the evergreen bush. I went back to the shed and selected the sharp spade shovel. I wanted--needed--to be able to quickly put him out of his misery. No more pain, man. I practiced on a couple of nearby sticks--snap--and then I walked over to the fallen squirrel and, without pause, slammed the point of the shovel down on his neck. Snap.

I closed his eye with a small stick and then dug about three feet down and lay his body in the hole. I put the half-eaten Granny Smith apple in the hole next to him. [Imagine, giving your life for a fucking apple.] I grabbed a piece of concrete from the side of the house and gently lay it down over his body and I finished filling in the hole.

I walked back inside and Lou and Oliver sniffed at my hands, almost as if they'd been expecting me to bring their toy back in the house with me. No such luck. They got dog biscuits, instead.

EDIT: You know what makes this sad story even more sad? I took the boys out, just now, to see how they would do sharing their playground with a squirrel graveyard and, as I walked out to the table and chair, I heard a chick-chluck-chluck from over my head. 'Twas another squirrel in the aforementioned nook. As I watched, it scooted from the nook and up the branch a ways, whereupon it sat, tail twitching, staring down and chattering at me. I sat there for a good ten minutes and it sat there, too--didn't move an inch. It just sat there and burned holes in me with its beady black eyes, raining squirrel curses down on me. It makes me think that I killed its spouse or something. God, is the natural world really this Disney-esque? Damn squirrel is giving me a guilt trip.