I ran inside. I found an decrepit small round wicker basket and lined it with an old kitchen towel. Then I put on gloves and ran back outside. Must save squirrel! I carefully levered the squirrel into the basket. Now what? I saw my neighbor outside in his front yard.
“Hey Roger, do you know what to do with a baby squirrel?”
“No, sorry.” He didn't even want to look at it, although I held out the basket like an offering: Take this squirrel, please!
I took it inside the house, set the basket on the stove, and texted my sister-in-law Dierdre, the one-woman animal rescue super hero. No response. I dialed the Audubon Society.
“I found a baby squirrel,” I said to the woman on the phone. “What should I do?”
“Is it red or gray?”
“Gray.”
“Nonnative, invasive species. Put it back outside and let nature take its course.”
I hung up, resigned. Trash squirrels apparently don't deserve to be rescued. Cute little gray squirrels grow up to be nasty invaders, crowding out the cute little red squirrels. Oh well. Kill one species to save another...
Suddenly the phone rang.
“Is this Carol? I'm Laurie. I'm calling about the baby squirrel?” I sent a prayer of thanks up: Dierdre had apparently called her squirrel rescue compadres.
“Audubon told me to leave it outside and let nature kill it.”
“No, no, they're wrong! I'll come and get it. Give me your address.” I told her how to find me and she told me what to do for the squirrel while I waited. Most important: keep it warm. “Put it inside your shirt,” she suggested.
“Not a chance,” I replied.
“Well, do you have a heating pad?”
“I'll figure out something,” I said. We hung up.
I turned the oven on warm and put the basket o' squirrel on the back burner. I went back to my editing project, checking on the squirrel every few minutes. Things soon got toasty on the stove. The squirrel started moving around and squeaking. Was that a good sign, or was it starting to cook?
“Chill out, Frank,” I told it. My cat sat nearby, looking perplexed.
Laurie had said wrap the squirrel up tight (“like it is the nest,” as if I've ever seen the inside of a squirrel nest), so I wrapped it not too tightly in a swatch of old fleece bathrobe and put it back in the basket. The next time I checked, it had crawled out of the fleece and the basket and was scrabbling blindly around on the edge of the hot stove. Another inch and it would have landed nose-first on the kitchen floor. I grabbed it and put it back in the basket. “WTF, Frank!?” Was it too hot, or was it looking for more heat? Who knows what is in the mind of an abandoned baby squirrel?
Two hours later, Laurie finally arrived. She'd come from the west side of Portland in rush hour traffic. Now, that is the mark of a super hero. I led her to the kitchen and showed her the basket on the stove. She rubbed the thing's stomach as if she'd done this many times before.
“Oh, it's a little girl,” she said happily. Okay, I thought, not Frank, Francis.
She wrapped the squirrel up in a fuzzy scarf. Then she looked at it more closely.
“Oh, no,” she said.
“Is it...?”
She started breathing into its face while I watched in appalled fascination.
“Come on, little girl, come on,” she murmured, doing squirrel CPR. I escorted her to the door and off she went into the night, carrying what might have been a recently deceased baby squirrel.
Or not. As long as I don't know for sure if the squirrel died, the squirrel exists in that quantum physics limbo, neither dead nor alive, but a strange combination of both. I still don't know the outcome. The squirrel probably died. But maybe not. It might have lived. For me, it's both alive and dead. A feeling I experience myself at times.
It's been a week, and I still think about that squirrel.
