Two summers ago I borrowed my dad’s pump BB gun and decided I’d just scare them a bit, run them off the ranch, so to speak. One afternoon I took a shot at one in the pear tree and it ran off toward a massively tall tree near our back fence. It perched on a branch and looked at me and I took another shot. It started to run up the tree but then fell down to the ground. I expected it get back up again and scurry away, it’s tail between its legs, ne’er to return again. But it didn’t. I didn’t see any blood but it was panting. I watched it, hoping it would recover but instead it died. So I buried it in a shallow grave. I had never before killed anything with fur on it (I’m strictly a bug killin’ man) and not only felt bad that I killed it but also that I let it suffer, albeit in ignorance. I didn’t think that a mere BB gun could be so fatal. It was just the one squirrel I killed but that fall we had more than the usual amount of pears for human consumption.
The following year in the fall a dummy light came on for the van we keep outside (the garage is still packed with things from moving, an issue I’m perpetually intending to remedy). I opened the hood and saw that the oil and transmission dipsticks were inside the engine compartment and somehow, in rattling around, they had broken the wires for the traction control. I was able to fix the wires with a bit of solder and extra wire but couldn’t find anything online about what would cause the dipsticks to blow out of their holders like that. A month or two later I opened the hood again and it was full of leaves. That’s right, some squirrel had made a nest inside the engine compartment and this time chewed through the cruise control wires. Also the dipsticks were out. Bugger! I cleaned out the leaves and tried a couple of home remedies, like soaking a rag in ammonia, but still every now and then I’d find a dipstick out. We had lived the squirrels for years and never had this problem so it had to be just one rascally varmint that had “discovered” a great hiding place. Or maybe it was payback for taking down one of their ilk.
Then one day in late winter my daughter came into the house and said her are wouldn’t start. She had a brand new battery but I figured she had left some light on so I grabbed the jumper cables and headed out. The surprise under her hood was a nest made of the fireproof material under the hood, two chewed out spark plug wires and a bunch of throttle something-or-other wires chewed right up to the plastic connector. This was all fixed with a trip to the junk yard but I had taken the rare luxury of a sick day (now spoiled) which made the damage seem even more personal.
I started watching the squirrels in my yard, and there were a lot of them, sometimes as many as five just in one tree. And then there was the day that I went outside and there was a squirrel standing stock-still on the ground by the front passenger side tire of the fan, kind of hunkered down with a look of “Crap! I’m busted” on its face. It had a frayed tail, more of a crop that then usual taper. And he looked ornery. I opened the hood and the dipsticks were in place and there was no sign of damage but when I started up the van the traction control lights came on again. I checked the wires under the hood and they were fine. However by the wheel, where the cantankerous squirrel had been, I found a two inch piece of wire. That city rat had gone into the wheel well and chewed out a piece of wire OUT OF SPITE! This certainly was a declaration of war.
I had my own pump BB gun within 24 hours.
Now I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that it was this razzle-tailed varmint that was doing the chewing and it’s not always easy to see the tail when they’re on a branch twenty or thirty feet away from you so I began to hunt indiscriminately. The first one was saddening, though not as much as the “accidental” shooting. I took out two more over the course of a week, all of them with one shot to get them from the tree and one more so they didn’t suffer. I decided to stop and see if perhaps the dipstick shenanigans would stop. I mean, there are dozens of squirrels just on my street. I would feel like a serial killer if I started taking them all out. Still, once you have the taste of the hunt I would see a squirrel on my lawn and feel the impulse to go get the gun. Still I held off and for two weeks, although there were still plenty of critters in our yard there wasn’t any changed in our vehicles. Maybe, just maybe, I got the right one.
Except I probably didn’t. One afternoon the kids came running inside. “Daaaaad! There’s a squirrel inside the van!” They were outside and watched a squirrel go up inside the van. They eventually banged on the vehicle enough that he came out and went up a tree, which is where I found him. It was old razzle tail! I got a couple of shots at him but he bounded to another tree and seemingly disappeared into nowhere. Now I knew my enemy. In way I had an arch nemesis and it gave meaning to my life.
A day or two later I was inside and saw razzle tail just outside the back door. I grabbed my BB gun and slowly opened the door. The first shot missed and since his back was to me he barely moved. The second shot got him in the hind legs. And then I winced. He was army crawling toward the big tree where I got my first kill. It was both admirable and pitying. However I knew it would be cruel to let him live and so didn’t. He received an honorable burial spot near the compost pile. And that was that.
Except it wasn’t. A few days later the kids were back. “That squirrel is under the van again!” What? Two squirrels with the same razzle tail? HOW MUCH BLOOD DO I HAVE TO SHED?!?!?! HOW MANY MORE INNOCENTS MUST LOSE THEIR LIVES BEFORE OUR VEHICLES ARE SAFE?!?!
I found him on a branch of a tree in our front yard, looking down at me. I could see his tail and yes, it was him. I wonder if earlier I had killed Son O’ Razzle Tail. Amazingly my first shot took and he fell out of the tree, out of sight behind the trunk of the ancient oak. As I went around the tree I was startled to see that he too was only injured and was army crawling. Army crawling TOWARD MY DAUGHTERS CAR! I carefully took a shot so as not to hit her car and I missed. Then he was gone, climbing up in the undercarriage. I opened the hood to be safe and he wasn’t there. I couldn’t find him anywhere so I borrowed her keys and took the car around the block, watching for him to fall out in the rear view mirror. Surely he was at death’s door! But no, wherever he was, he clung on like the fighter that he is. An admirable opponent, indeed. I parked the car and went onto the front porch. Ten minutes later I saw him on the road, flat against the pavement. Ah, the ol’ bugger crawled out of his hiding spot and died. I went to the side of the house and got a shovel and a five gallon bucket. When I came around the corner of the car he lifted his head and clambered into the wheel well. The galoot wasn’t dead after all! I could see his tail sticking out but what could I do? I wasn’t about to grab the tail of a wounded animal and I couldn’t really get any kind of shot, even at point blank range. And I wasn’t about to jack the car up and take off the wheel, though maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
So I decided to wait him out. He came out a couple of times and laid on the road but as soon as a car drove past he would climb back into the wheel well. Before long it was closing in on five o’clock and there was enough constant traffic that I didn’t see him come out again.
And I haven’t seen him since. I half expected to find his carcass under her car in the morning but there was nothing. Again I took the car around the block, expecting his body to fall out of whatever he was hiding but it was obvious by this time that he was gone. Gone. I’d like to believe that he’s dead but like as terminator-like as he was I won’t be surprised if he’s somewhere healing and plotting and one day we will have another confrontation, a worthy adversary indeed. Until we meet again, Razzle Tail… until we meet again.
