SQUIRREL TALES: 5
by Mary Lee Corlett
INTERLEAF: THE TALE OF SCOOTER FIELDING AS TOLD TO HAZEL BY MRS. SUCH
“The day had started out usual enough for Sheldon Fielding. From boyhood he had hated his name, a family tradition going back generations, and so his friends began calling him Scooter because he had the uncanny ability to scoot along the thinnest of branches to claim the most tender buds at the very tips; and he could do this without causing the branch to sway any more than it would in a gentle breeze. He had “the touch.” He was indeed the most agile squirrel I have ever known. But, I digress….
“As I said, the morning was typical for early summer—bright, but with a touch of humidity and a filmy blue sky overhead that promised rain later. Scooter sat in the ornamental plum tree that grew alongside the brick walkway leading from the Dodgeway to the front steps of the Boxel House in his yard. He was munching on one of its juicy plums. This tree wasn’t supposed to even have fruit—it was “ornamental,” meant for decoration. Scooter knew this because he had heard one of the Boxels say so, and she was not happy when she discovered they were going to have an abundant harvest. “Just great!” she had moaned, “We will have smashed plums all over the walkway and that means they’ll be tracked into the house!” Scooter wasn’t sure how you would go about tracking a plum into a Boxel House, although he supposed that if it moved you just followed it closely, but anyway he thought it was a great bonus to have the plums on that tree, even if the Boxel did not! But, I digress….
“Scooter was sitting in that plum tree, hidden well enough among the branches, when the Boxels, as they did nearly every morning at this time, suddenly rushed out their front door, raced to their Rolling Box (RB) parked on the Dodgeway, and sped away. They never even noticed him sitting there. But Scooter, on the other hand, had noticed that one of the Boxels had dropped something thin and long and rather shiny. It lay on the walkway, glittering in the morning sun. And so, he climbed down from the tree to investigate. It was indeed very long and snake-like, but much too skinny to actually be a snake. And since he’d seen it fall from around the Girl-Boxel’s neck as she heaved her big pack onto her back, he was nearly sure it wouldn’t be alive, or too harmful. Still he approached it cautiously, step by step, nose twitching, eyes fixed on it just in case it was motionless in order to trick him into thinking it was safe. He breathed a little sigh of relief when he was finally close enough to be almost certain that it was a “thing” not a “creature.” It was very long indeed, at least four or five times as long as he was from head to toe. It was made of small silver circles, hollow in the middle and linked together. It looked as if it had once been connected to form a continuous loop, but the place where it had been joined was now broken. It just lay there, catching the sunlight on each of its many links. Scooter was very interested. He was close enough to smell it now. He strained his neck forward, sniffing, sniffing…when suddenly, with a flying leap he jumped upward and backward at the same time, two feet into the air, landing on all fours, poised for flight.
“That thing just moved!” he shouted. But he didn’t turn tail and run because just as his feet hit the ground he realized, “No. It was just a trick of the light.” He laughed with nervous relief, then he thought of his very theatrical jump, the memory making him feel a little foolish. He quickly looked all around to be sure no one was there to catch him in what would have been a hugely embarrassing moment. Luckily, the place was deserted.
“Slowly now, he reached out and cautiously touched the shimmering circles. In that split second of contact the thing hooked itself onto Scooter’s claw and he withdrew his front paw in surprise. But when he tried to shake the thing loose it remained stubbornly attached, whipping upward, downward, and then around and around like a wild thing! Scooter did what anyone with sense would have done in his situation—he panicked! He took off running at top speed thinking he could outrun it. But the silvery creature had released itself from his front claw only to instantly reattach itself to his back one as he tripped over it! Heart racing, terror taking control of his thoughts, Scooter bolted for the tallest tree—only it wasn’t exactly a tree. With a great flying leap he was off the ground and racing up to the top of the nearest light pole, which was located directly across the Dodgeway from the Boxel House. All the while, that thing was still attached and swinging wildly in the air behind him. To make matters worse, its wild movements caused it to occasionally whip him on the rear end, which only spurred him onward and upward, until at last he reached the top of the pole, where he froze—his only apparent option for continuing on was to traverse the high wires. But in that single moment when he stood motionless, Scooter realized that his pursuer wasn’t whipping him in the butt anymore, although it was still swinging at a pretty good clip as it dangled beneath his foot. He sucked in a great gasp of air, happy to discover that he could in fact still breathe, as long as he gave each intake and output of breath careful thought. The panic subsided. Scooter looked down. Not more than a couple of squirrel-lengths beneath him, mounted on the light pole, was one of those deadly Pole Boxes with the wires attached. And he had just jumped right over that thing! At least he must have. He didn’t remember doing it, exactly. But now, as he sat perched momentarily just above that Pole Box on a crossbeam near the very top of the light pole, the chain was slowly, slowly working its way loose from around his toe until it quietly slithered downward and dropped, unceremoniously, right onto that Pole Box.
“The explosive sound that followed as metal contacted metal was deafening, and sent Scooter once again straight into the air, his fur now singed in places by flying sparks. Yet somehow he managed to gain a paw-hold on the branch of a tulip poplar tree that extended out high above the wires, but that he would never have been able to reach if he had not been catapulted into the air by the force of the explosion. Scooter sat in that poplar tree thinking that he’d just been given another chance at life.
“Those Boxels in the neighborhood who were still in their houses that morning stepped outside their front doors to try to see what had detonated. There didn’t seem to be any lights on anymore inside any of their houses, and every last porch light in the neighborhood that had been left on from the night before was now off. Most of the day passed and several big Boxel Trucks came and went in the neighborhood before those porch lights finally came back on.”
***
"Mrs. Such always tells the ‘Tale of Scooter Fielding’ exactly the same way," Hazel sighed as she looked up from the leaf on which the end of the story was recorded and slowly drifted back into the present moment on the brief, timeless silence that always marked the end of the tale. “We all know it by heart.”
"But nobody ever minds the repetition," Nutmeg noted. In fact, it was a point of pride, a sign that you were growing up, to be able to boast that you had heard that particular tale so often you now had it memorized. "And, still,” Nutmeg continued, “no matter how many times we've all heard it, we always burst into wild applause when Mrs. Such gets to the part where the lights go out in the Boxel neighborhood."
“Do you remember that time when Digs almost fell off the branch because of the clapping?” Hazel suddenly remembered with a laugh.
“Oh Yeah!” Nutmeg giggled, “We were all applauding so mightily, Digs too, that the branch we were all sitting on got to really shaking and Digs was the last one in line on the end farthest from the tree trunk.”
“Flipped right off! He dangled there a while before we’d even realized he’d gone overboard. It took three of us to pull him back into place.”
There was no question; Mrs. Such’s narratives—the tale and the telling of the tale—were as much a part of their lives as were nuts or trees.
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