The Taming Of The Squirrel...

I think I’ve previously mentioned my love of squirrels. If I haven’t, then let me mention it now. Squirrels are so cute with their bushy tails (except for this one that I saw a couple of days ago. It had mange and was mostly bald. It was really rather gross) and their little hands. Sometimes I feed them out the window of our 2nd story apartment. I have a few snack sized bags of chex mix that I sprinkle down from the open screen and drop to the ground. My squirrel (I call him Paul after Paul McCartney) comes over and eats it. Squirreling (ha!) it away in his cheek pouches. A-fucking-dorable.

Anyway, so even though I love squirrels, I’m wary of them. I won’t hand feed them the way some people do. I know from experience that a wild squirrel cannot be tamed. When I was 19, I was attending college at Indiana University-Kokomo, or IUK. Being such a small satellite school, it only had 3 buildings. They were arranged in a triangle and in the center was a little grassy area with sidewalks between the buildings. There were trees aligning 2 of the sides of the campus and a parking area aligning the 3rd. It was (and I’m sure still is) a very nice looking campus.

As I said before about the squirrels, sometimes folks try to tame them. They are able to hand feed them. The little squirrel inches its way up to you and gently takes the food from your fingertips. Sounds lovable, right? Don’t be fooled! They are vicious, wild animals. They will attack you in the wink of an eye. And, it will be without warning.

One day, I was walking with a friend who was also attending IUK. His name is Ryan and he’s a queenie bitch of a man. His mannerisms are extremely feminine. When he screams, as he did one fall day, it sounds like a woman. What made him scream was a ferocious squirrel. Ryan bent to offer a bit of stale bread that he always carried with him to feed the squirrels. The squirrel crept up to Ryan and took the proffered bread. Nibbling at it quickly and shoving it into its cheek pouches. It sat up and waited for a moment, as if silently asking for another bit of bread. Then, without warning, it got a crazy look in its eyes and leapt up into the air, hurling its tiny body towards Ryan’s skinny little chicken’s leg decked out in some sort of designer jean.

The squirrel latched itself onto Ryan’s leg with that crazed look, hooking his tiny paws onto each side of the leg of his pants. Ryan squealed like a woman and began to violently shake his leg in an attempt to unlatch the squirrel. His arms were flailing and the messenger bag on his shoulder dropped to the ground. All of this seemed to piss off the squirrel so he bit into Ryan’s leg-through the denim-with his sharp little teeth. After biting him, the squirrel pulled back and looked up at Ryan for a brief moment before releasing its talon-like claws and jumping back and off of him and running up the nearest tree, the taste of blood in his mouth.

Ryan’s poor leg needed a couple of stitches and he had to have a series of rabies shots in his belly. The day after it happened, the Dean sent out an email to all students, warning them against feeding the seemingly tame squirrels. Everyone at the tiny school heard variations of the story as it flew around the campus from mouth to ear to mouth. I, myself, heard a few deviations from what happened as an eyewitness to the account. I never corrected anyone; instead, I just enjoyed the stories and laughed internally at the varying degrees of severity of them. The next semester, I dropped out. So did Ryan.