Stumpy

She had always had a pragmatic outlook on life; never given to the useless entrapment of sentimentality. It had served her well. When her husband left her with a small child, she sturdily picked up the pieces of her minimally-shattered life, took a position with a charitable organization as their general accounts manager, and got on with things. Raising her daughter on her own, just as so many other women did their children, and somehow managing to do it right.

Carol encouraged her to get out of the house when her grandchildren were away at school. It was enough, her daughter said, that she was there, when they returned on the school bus, waiting for them at the corner to walk them home, see they had their snacks, gave them the oversight they needed, while their mother was at work. They were fatherless, in essence, just as their mother had been. But their father had left their joint bank account intact, had signed the necessary papers to have her the sole signer. Nor had he demanded they sell their house, so he could begin anew with half the proceeds. He did the honourable thing. In part, he did; he did not pay child support and since he had chosen to live halfway across the world, there was no legal way to insist he do that.

Edith thought her daughter’s advice was practical and useful, and she began taking the family’s little Pomeranian out for daily walks. She always had, but just around the neighbouring streets, not far from the house she now shared with her daughter. She wondered whether the little dog, weighing a bare five pounds, could walk further. And discovered it could, and so could she. So she began ambulating a little further day by day, discovering a network of area parks and recreation paths that began to fascinate her.

Above all, an area set well distant from the park-like façade, where children’s play equipment - different types in all of the park - had been established, and which she occasionally had taken the youngest grandchild to, before he too began attending school full-time. This other area was rough, no municipal crews ventured there to tidy things up, because they couldn’t. It was a ravine setting, a series of hills and valleys, where the municipality had set up a storm-sewage system, and where a wide creek ran constantly with muddy water, a quite unlovely natural creek. But the setting around it compensated, heavily forested with large old pines, spruces, firs, and great old willows down by the meandering creek.

She had seen a plenitude of small wildlife up above, in the other, manicured park areas, particularly in the fall when squirrels and chipmunks began frenetically preparing for winter. But down there, in the ravine, where she and Milly wandered, the little dog taken off its leash to sniff about randomly, it was a different world. The squirrels were varied and numerous, black, grey, red and quarrelsome, chattering angrily from tree branches at one another. Or were they reserving their ire for her presence and that of the little dog?

She rarely saw other people walking along in there. When Carol was casually informed one day about her mother’s new insights into suburban wildlife and the pleasure of wandering in an isolated area, she was a little upset. What if her mother was accosted by some sociopath, she asked her mother, who snorted, who would bother with an old woman like her? Not the point, her daughter said, it was possible, it could happen, and who would be there to witness it, to come to her aid? Not to worry, her mother quipped, Millicent was a dependable watchdog. Her daughter sighed, shrugged her shoulders and said her mother was old enough to know better. To which her mother responded she was old enough to be trusted to make intelligent decisions for herself. Fear of the unknown and the dim potential was not going to dominate her life.

Someone she once knew, who was committed to the humane rehabilitation of wild and feral animals used to entertain her with stories of his exploits and experiences. Her own sister, whom she considered the wrong side of eccentric, took to adopting feral cats, at the great physical expense inherent in trapping, thus rescuing them from their own frail devices; prowling about, fending for themselves, bearing countless litters; living freely but mangy, half-starved lives. Oh, and the expense involved in neutering them, then allowing them their freedom, sans reproductive capacity.

That old acquaintance would ignore his desk covered with urgent tasks, corner her at her own, usually when she was marching against a deadline, to extol his volunteer ventures. She, too polite to protest, would sit there, captured by his need to detain he, and listened resentfully, at once fascinated yet annoyed to be held back from her work. A victim of her own civility.

In any event, she heard from him on one occasion of the rescue of a nested litter of baby squirrels. Unable to exit their home, to clamber down from the tree, held fast as prisoners of their knotted, intertwined tails. He described how difficult it had been, and frustrating, to work on the frightened little creatures, to free them from their braided tails. Some might be successfully entangled, left with tails intact, others sadly and by necessity had their tails snipped off.

Then the task of nurturing the frantic animals, quieting them down, giving them food and comfort and a sense of security. No hope of ever re-uniting them with the mother that bore them. She had, in any event, likely abandoned them, unable to grasp why her litter failed to fly the coop, as it were. Abandoned, left on their own, to starve. Their piteous mewling obviously failing to move compassion in the heart of their departing mother.

She wondered, as she wandered in the ravine, watching the squirrels cavort in the spring, nest in the summer, and gather in the fall, how often that kind of anomalous small-animal tragedy occurred. Who would ever know, apart from someone so dedicated as her colleague had been, searching out these little lapses in nature’s plan?

The squirrels she saw looked healthy and saucy; intrepidly, carelessly, it seemed to her, hurling themselves from branch to branch, speedily making their way to some obviously important destination. They needed no human intervention; more than capable of themselves completing their normal life-cycle.

And then, one day as she was strolling about, the little dog busy with its own antics, endlessly sniffing, stopping occasionally to relieve itself, she noticed a small black squirrel heading directly toward her. It was unmistakable, that squirrel seemed resolved to confront her. She stopped walking, stood there on the gravelled trail, and waited. The squirrel came to a stop directly in front of her. Millie made a short, sharp dart toward the squirrel. She often indulged in such responses, but never ran after them for very long; they invariably left her far behind, leaping onto tree trunks, and into densely-leafed branches.

Edith heard a quick “no!” issue from her mouth, and Millie ran back to her side. And the squirrel, who had run off just a bit, as though sensing that this ridiculous little dog, hardly larger than it was, posed no risk, advanced again. And then stopped, directly in front of Edith. What, Edith wondered, what did it want? She pushed one of her hands into the pocket of her jacket, found a few sticks of chewing gum, elastics, a rubber eraser, and a wrapped coconut cookie, which she withdrew, pulled from its wrapping, and broke up, letting pieces drop to the ground. The squirrel darted forward, picked up a piece of the cookie, turned it a few times in its clever paws, then ran off, stopping not far away, to sit there and eat its prize. Edith stood, watching the creature, amazed. And was even more amazed when the squirrel returned and picked up another piece of cookie, removed itself briefly for another feast, and repeated its clever trick once more, before running off.

Next time Edith was shopping she picked up a large bag of unshelled peanuts. Next time she took Millie out for their daily walk she stuffed her pockets with peanuts. And began to leave them in places along the trails she took. In the crooks of branches, on top of snagged tree trunks, inserting them into holes in the bark of trees. Invariably, on her quotidian return, the peanuts were gone. And she restored them to the previous cache places. Before long she began to notice squirrels, black, grey, red, waiting at those designated places, or scrambling up to them, to see if anything had been left.

And she also recognized the first little black squirrel that had originally accosted her, he was the only one among all those she regularly saw who boldly confronted her, then sat quietly until she retrieved a peanut from her pocket and tossed it to him. No mistaking this little fellow. Where all the others had long bushy tails they often flicked contemptuously at Millie, daring her to rush them, he never ever did that. He had no tail to speak of. He had a little brush, a stump of a tail, its end pure white.

She named him Stumpy. When she told her grandchildren about her special squirrel, they winced, said that wasn’t at all polite, and surely the squirrel would be insulted. Couldn’t she name him something nice? Stumpy he remained. Their relationship grew, she became accustomed to seeing him every day, greeted him by exclaiming Stumpy! And he appeared to recognize her voice, that she was calling him.

This was, of course, sheer anthropomorphism, she knew that. He had his smarts, but he was a squirrel. Although sometimes he looked, with his back to her, turning one of her offerings around in his paws, more like a rabbit. Rabbits were also seen down there, in the ravine, but infrequently.

She also saw Stumpy raiding some of the caches she left along the trail, and this reassured her. For there were days when she might miss seeing him, and she’d worry, wonder whether his lack of tail put him at a disadvantage. She visualized to herself all manner of difficulties he might encounter; his stump of a tail would require a different sense of balance, surely it impaired him for leaping as normal squirrels did, from branch to tree branch. Once, she missed seeing him for an entire week and was convinced he had met his end.

And then he turned up. Nonchalantly advanced toward her as he always did, Millie dashing toward him. Sometimes Stumpy held firm, refused to give ground for Millie, and Millie invariably went so far, and no further, before resuming her place at Edith’s feet. And that made Edith worry that Stumpy was too trusting, too courageous, and that would surely result in catastrophe, should he attempt this approach with others along the trails with their dogs.

And had she ever seen anyone else in there, much less someone with a dog, other than herself and Millie? Rarely. Once a truly cantankerous elderly man walking a regal-looking standard poodle. The way the man ignored her greeting, and prodded his dog along, when it evinced curiosity about her and Millie offended her greatly. She reasoned that doddering old gaffer wouldn’t venture far, before turning back to exit the ravine network. And she was right; she never saw him or his dog again.

Stumpy, meanwhile, availed himself of what she left, in active challenge to the other squirrels who on some days almost swamped her with their presence, leaping about everywhere she looked, all of them seemingly concerned to arrive at the peanut depots before their challengers. She watched, bemused, sometimes, as a grey squirrel would manage to stuff two peanuts at once into its little maw, then leave, triumphant. She always felt a compunction to return, re-deposit peanuts for those who arrived late, and she did, then watched at a distance, as each retrieved their trophy.

It became a standing topic of conversation, a jocular one, at the dinner table, with Carol asking her mother how her ravine jaunt had been that day, and the children chirping in after their mother. Good, she always assured them, going on to outline her day’s adventure there. It was an adventure, it gave her such an peculiar sense of pleasure to be there, to observe, to interact as much as she was able to. Nor did she miss the presence of other creatures; occasionally a raccoon up on high branches of an old pine, snugly curled, asleep.

Woodpeckers, from the tiny downy, the larger hairy and still-larger pileated, that drummed on the tree trunks, the latter extracting huge white slivers in its search for insects, littering the ground around the unfortunate tree, left afterward with wide, white-gaping wounds, sap dripping from them.

But it was her anticipated sightings of Stumpy and his bravado, that endowed her with that warm feeling of having made contact with something worthwhile in the world she alone inhabited. Did she, she asked herself, have so little of value in her world, that she expected so much of a small animal that had suffered hard times? What of her relationship with her daughter, her care of her small grandchildren, what of that?

What of that? her other self challenged.