“My apologies," said the squirrel. "I’m
being rude, interrupting your solitude."
Terry looked up and saw a gray
squirrel, perched on a pine branch not six feet above his head. Not knowing quite
why, Terry said "What do you want?"
"You humans fascinate me.”
Terry imagined telling this one to
Dr. Fischer, the shrink to whom he paid $150 an hour regularly on Tuesdays at three pm. "Take some time off," advised his brain
doctor. "Go into the mountains, sit by a stream, don't even take a
book."
Okay. Overnight, no longer. Maybe enough
time to temporarily turn off the police scanner that was his prefrontal cortex,
the row of blue and red lights that flashed and chased each other back and
forth along a black bandwidth of his mind. The job, the wife, kids, politics,
the truck making a strange noise, his weight. The nameless dreads every
morning. The walking worried, said the doc.
Nothing
Terry tried had worked -- self-help books, classes, yoga, meditation, all
quickly abandoned. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was play-acting a centuries-old
mystical tradition.
So now, sitting on a camp table next
to his backpack, in a clearing that let the sun shine in through dark green
trees, Terry was having a conversation with a squirrel.
He stared at the critter. "Fascinate?"
The faraway drone of a small plane came and went.
"Yep," said the squirrel.
"Tell me, is this a beautiful spot or what? The weather's glorious. That
burbly creek over there has been washing those river boulders -- singing its
song -- longer even than you’ve had your job!”
"What in the world do you know
about having a job!" snapped Terry. "Your job is to forage for nuts. Yummy!"
The furry-tailed beastie jumped down
to a stump close by. It sat up on its hind legs and flicked its tail like
squirrels do.
"Do you know how much DNA is shared between you and me? We're not that far apart on the family
tree."
Being condescended to by a squirrel!
“Okay, smart guy,” Terry said. “What’s
the square root of minus one? Explain the space-time continuum. Brownian
movement?"
The squirrel smirked. "I’m not
the one sitting out here jonesing, uncomfortable in my own skin. And it’s
Brownian motion by the way."
If squirrels can chuckle, this one
did at the dig. Or maybe it was the snick-snick-snick they do anyway. The
clever rodent went on. "Admit it, you humans with your massive brains have
the illusion you can control things."
"Illusion! And you’re under the
illusion that that owl up there isn’t thinking of you as lunch.”
"That owl is an illusion."
"Oh great, now we're into Zen,"
said Terry. "Please don’t go all `lilies of the field’ on me."
The squirrel seemed to think for a
second, then hopped down and headed for the nearest tree.
“Wait!” called Terry. “Hey, I’m
sorry. Come back.”
The squirrel scampered into the
understory. It reappeared. “Up here,” it said. It dropped a pine cone onto the picnic
table and returned. It demonstrated how to extract the caramel-colored pine
seeds lodged tight in the brittle crevasses.
"You ever eaten pine
nuts?"
"Not raw." Terry broke off
the hard nubbins with his teeth and sampled a few. The blue and red lights were
flickering, but only dimly. "Utterly ridiculous. I am losing my
mind."
“Not prime rib, I’m assuming,” said
the squirrel, “but you’re being a good sport.”
Suddenly tired, Terry started to relax -- but only for a
second. Neither he nor the squirrel saw it coming. Like a guided missile, with outstretched
claws and terrible hooked beak and blazing yellow eyes, a huge owl rocketed
down out of the sky, then leveled off for an instant in a parabolic swoop
before grabbing the stunned squirrel in its talons.
Or it would have, except at the last instant Terry
grabbed his backpack and swung it with all his might. The blow sent the bird,
head over feathered tail, into a stand of manzanita -- from which it struggled, extracted
itself, fluttered its wings once, and glaring eyes wide as saucers, escaped
high into the distance and vanished.
Terry's whole body shook. His head and heart were pounding.
The squirrel had disappeared. He listened. No scratching or rustling in the
underbrush, just the winsome sigh of an afternoon breeze in the canopy of
evergreens.
Clearly, he'd imagined the whole thing. Dreamt it. But he
noticed that his mind was clear for the first time in days. No kaleidoscope of
thoughts racing through his head. The scanner was off.
Terry looked around. There was some pine-like debris on
the table, but the wind must have sent it down.
I
was not talking to a squirrel, he thought. Squirrels cannot talk. I fell asleep.
He stood up and tucked in his shirt.
He stretched and walked stiff-legged to his truck to get a soda. Then he stopped
cold and stared at the top of the utility box in the truck bed. There were
three individual ponderosa pine cones, not stacked actually but placed together,
and caramel-colored seeds arranged just so around them.
Terry retrieved his smart phone and double-checked. Yep,
next Tuesday at three, Dr. Fischer.
