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Member
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 11
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The First Nut (first half of story)
Hurgie threw the first nut – I’ll always remember that.
“She’s mine!” he cried, darting behind the rough, crackled trunk. “I saw her first!”
At just that moment a large acorn plummeted toward my head. “You can’t possibly remember that!” I relaxed my back muscles to let my upper body swing away from the tree, claws still anchoring me to its skin, and I used my free paw to catch the nut. I would like to say that I both caught and released it toward my adversary in one smooth motion, but a nobleman does not lie. Let’s just say there was a little lag time, but not enough for me to lose the upper paw.
“Awh, shnoop!” Hurgie swore and fell back. His brown, rounded body flew through the air to the waiting earth, his fur aching for the opposite direction. It reached up to me as if it had made the decision I was still waiting for my Jojey to render.
“You’re no match for me, Hatchie,” he threatened, raising a hefty paw. I could see patches of fur removed from his chest in the pattern of a “J” – as if that would impress her. “You’ll rue the day you messed with this squirrel!” He tried to wipe the dirt from his coat but the drizzles earlier that day had created puddles under our grudgingly-common home and the mud had taken a liking to Hurgie’s backside. He wiped harder. His body contorted, the rolls of his stomach fat protruding like a snail’s head emerging timidly from its shell. I longed for my beautiful Jojey to wake up from her simulated nap on the topmost branches we reserved for her to see my foe at his foppish best.
“Not today, though, huh, Hurgie?” I sneered. I grabbed hold of a large branch nearby and shook it, hoping simultaneously that the commotion would awaken my love and that she would in the confusion overlook my culpability.
“What are you two losers making so much noise about?” The voice from above our heads both chilled my heart with its grating timbre and inflamed it with a passion to possess the lips that spewed it forth. My heart’s beat synchronized with the swing of her hips over my head. I glanced down to see Hurgie straighten up, his hands covering the spots in his coat that no amount of brutish force was going to remove without some clean water.
“Jojey, baby! D’you sleep good?” he crooned upward through the fluttering leaves.
“Well, I was, before all that damned racket!” Her hips dropped and the tree rattled with the weight of my darling’s displeasure. “What kind of trouble are you two making? That’s all we need with that damned felinia down there all the time.” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the trunk, working her shoulders up and down to scratch herself against the jagged walls of our abode.
“Jojey, my sweet!” I cried out with a flourish of my arm in her direction. “I am sure that Hurgie meant us no harm with his untoward rowdiness.” I heard a peevish “Hmph!” from above as she turned her head away from the both of us, and a faint though distinctly stronger growl from below. “Perhaps he has finally decided to move on, to give us our space, our own little happy world, as we have always wanted.” As I smiled, my top teeth caught the sun and her eye, and I knew that the morning of polishing them with my spit on a leaf could not have been better spent. “I see that you have some itches; allow me to ascend and attend to them, my dear, for I loathe to see you in discomfort.”
My arm still raised, my shoulder began to tire but I dared not lower it before her judgment was wrought. A scrambling beneath me grew louder and I prayed that she would speak before he gained equal footing and rights to offer his services.
“Well,” she began at last, and the rustling that had nearly reached my feet ceased. “There are a few spots I can’t reach….” On cue, I scrambled up to her warm backside, my paw extended and ready moments before its need. As I listened to her satisfied grunts and tried to ignore the growing pain in my wrists,
I thought back to the first day I had seen her beautiful toothy grin….
I tried, anyway. Long-term memory has never been a strength of the squirrel nation. We go to the owls for that. There can’t be much worth remembering past a few days, in any case. You wait for acorns where you waited yesterday until they stop dropping. Then you either go up and do the work yourself or you move on to another branch. Winters must be hard, but we can’t remember those until we get right up to it, which is just as well. Who wants to worry?
The branch shakes from behind me. “Jojey, baby, you are looking hot today! I mean, sizzling! Way too good for a dorky, doofus – ” he squinted his eyes at me as if I were the cause of his poor vocabulary. “Come up higher with me and I’ll tell you how I outran the felinia just to bring you these nuts.” I see that while I’ve been hard at work on her neck, my rival helped himself to the small store of foodstuffs I had accumulated in a nook near where I’d been.
Jojey giggles and lifts her pudgy head, raises her lids in no hurry. As I gaze at her through a fog of disappointment, I try again to remember when we met, or when Hurgie and I began this feud. It just seems to have always been this way. Except for having the bad luck to fall for the same squirrel, I would never have spoken to him. Once out of swaddling furs, speaking to another squirrel unless in competition or conquest is unthinkable. It is not the squirrel way.
“Meeeeooooowwwww!” The roar of the felinia jolts me out of my reverie.
“Ooogh!” Jojey shrieks on her way past us to higher branches. She does not look back.
Hurgie grimaces as he glances down. The felinia, dark gray with a warrior’s mark of a white stripe down its nose, narrows its eyes at us. In the middle of two glowing green globes of eyes, black discs get larger. And closer. Its claws make a terrible scraping sound against the tree’s skin. It digs in. It reaches the first branch before sliding down. Two more tries and I watch, paralyzed, as it secures footing on the tree.
“Where are the humans?” I blurt out. I see Hurgie, frozen, in the corner of my sight. “Aren’t there any humans around?” I repeat, turning to look him in the eye.
“Wh-what?” he asks. I don’t know if he’s more stunned at the felinia’s progress or at my non-confrontational address. Both are without precedent.
“Why isn’t there any human – to get it?” I stammer.
“Meeeeeoooowwwww!” the thing growls up at us.
“Look,” Hurgie whispers to me. “It wrapped itself around the branch. It can’t go any higher.”
The thing lowers its head and turns it about.
“What’s it doing?” I whisper back, leaning in to him. I’m surprised at how comfortable it feels.
“Dunno,” he answers. Without asking, I know Hurgie’s limbs are laden with latent flight.
A low, human voice erupts from the nearby dwelling. We cover our ears as it approaches and expands. The felinia crouches into the branch, digging into it with too much force. I cringe inside for our father tree and what it must feel in the grip of the beast.
The human voice changes tone, becoming higher in pitch as it nears. It is still way too loud. I’m sure without some protection I would lose my hearing altogether, but I am too nervous to move. I glance at Hurgie; his expression reflects mine. It is a singular sensation to be in agreement with another squirrel.
Gigantic peach claws with blunt, round tips and no fur reach up and pry the animal from our father’s first arm. “Meow!” it responds a feeble protest. But then, finicky thing, it immediately curls up in the human’s arms and ceases any struggle for independence. I am disgusted, but I know this is only for the moment. I know that fear will return with the felinia.
“That was somethin’,” Hurgie declares, peeking at me shyly through the edges of his eyes.
“That was,” I agree cautiously. We both glance up at Jojey, dozing noisily in the upper reaches of our home, her corpulent bottom twitching from time to time with dream.
“Do you think it’ll get that high again?” Hurgie asks me tentatively, now turning his face halfway in my direction. “I mean, ordinarily, if a felinia claims a tree I would just move on, but since Jojey seems to like this tree….”
“Yes,” I agree with him again, now as perplexed as I am comforted by having someone to share this moment with. “She does seem to prefer it. And we – we’ve been here so long, I can’t remember another,” I reply.
“Good acorns,” Hurgie adds. “Good bark. Nice, meaty branches to rest on. No fungus.”
“He’s a good tree.” I nod to him. “I’d like to stay here.”
“And Jojey, of course.”
“Jojey, of course.”
“So,” Hurgie ventures on, turning now boldly his whole face in my direction – a gesture I force myself to reciprocate. “Maybe we should come up with a plan for the felinia’s next visit, eh?”
* * *
For the next several days, Hurgie and I nod in passing when we bounce into each other on the same branch, or run down the bark to some acorns on the ground. Sometimes we say, “Hi,” but mostly it’s nods. Jojey raised an eyebrow or two in the beginning, but never asks us about this strange behavior. She does spend a considerable amount of time cleaning her nails and shining them against the bark, however, so I can see that she has greater things on her mind.
Days pass peacefully this way. Hurgie and I give each other our own courting time with Jojey, not fussing as in the past. It could be my imagination, but I feel some of the tension in my neck and back muscles easing up. Which is odd, considering I am now in greater danger of felinia attack than I can remember in recent times.
And then one day, it happens.
“Meeeeeeeeeoooooooooowwwwwwwwww!” The felinia lunges at me out of nowhere. I must have been lost deep in thought on the pretty symmetry of a particular leaf of my father’s on his second arm, for I didn’t even notice the loud tearing of his flesh on the felinia’s rapid ascent.
“Meeeeeoooooooowwwwwww!” it screams again. I scramble out of its grasp and onto the second, third, and fourth branch before I look back down to assess my present danger.
I have made the mistake of stimulating the damn thing with the alacrity of my response. “Damn,” I mutter, watching it position itself against the trunk. Its hind legs rest for leverage on the thick first branch.
“Hatchie – here!” I hear a familiar voice call from above. “Here! Good job!” Hurgie, on the delicate tenth branch, darts out to the thin periphery. His arms are laden with nuts.
I race up the trunk, use branches for lift along the way. The felinia, predictably, can’t resist. It follows me up to exclusive squirrel/bird territory beyond the sixth branch. I remember – somehow! – the small hollow in the trunk at the base of arm ten, the stash of nuts Hurgie and I quietly built up. I load my arms up with motion so fast they almost lift me up in flight, and sprint out to join Hurgie.
The felinia hesitates mid-branch on the tenth. “Muurrrooowwwww!” it snarls, but confusion fills its eyes. Though I’ve said squirrels don’t have great memory, it is sharp as light for our predators, and I have seen that look before. The beast, once past the initial fury, will tarry as long as it needs to to wait out its prey. Felinias have a patience that’s from the devil. I’ve seen small creatures give themselves up out of tiredness, out of hunger, out of sheer frustration.
Thunk! The first acorn hits the monster square on the head between the ears. Whoosh! The second misses – my fault! – but we’re well-stocked for the attack. Another nut hits the beast between the eyes and it’s startled; its prowess is stunted. “Muuurrrroooowwwww?” it yells out, the upward inflection intoning its emotion. It swats with its paw, claws out, but we’re three branches above its reach. A third nut hits its nose with considerable force. As it rears its head to roar it loses grip on our father’s coat; it scuttles a few branches down before grabbing hold of an arm. Safe five or six branches above, Hurgie and I then unlock the dam and release the deluge of our acorns on the felinia’s defenseless corpus. Shrieking, it dives to the ground, barely using the branches to temper its descent. When it’s gotten far enough away for the shriek to subside we know we can congratulate each other.
But then, of course, there’s the issue of not knowing how.
“Yeah, Hatchie, uh,” Hurgie stammers in a courageous first bid. “Yeah.”
“And you – Hurgie! You!” I return. I note how much easier it seemed while we were in the thick of it, the felinia breathing hard our backs, to say “Good job.”
“We, we really – uh – we showed it, didn’t we?” Hurgie continues. He lowers his head, suddenly bashful. I detect a curvature in his belly fat that implies an imminent turn away.
I nod, and I go out on a limb. I hold out my paw for Hurgie’s. “That was fun, Hurgie.” I nod down at my paw. “That was good work.”
Hurgie extend his too but hesitates before meeting mine. I know he’s waiting to see if I will withdraw, or worse, use it to strike him. I will not. To show him this, I draw forward and grasp his paw. I hold it, just hold it, for a moment. And I shake it.
“We work together well, Hurgie.” I elaborate, an idea cracking open in my mind like a robin’s egg. “I could never have gotten all those nuts together by myself.”
“No,” he said. “Me neither.”
The idea opens its eyes, shakes its head and starts knocking on the eggs of its brothers.
“We couldn’t have used it this time, you know, but there is a hollow in our father’s trunk, up by the branch with the bluebird’s nest. I’m sure a little work with sharpened sticks could extend that hollow with no harm to our father or our neighbirds.”
“An extended hollow,” Hurgie murmurs. His paw still in mine, he renews the shake and sees it by a nod.
***
Last edited by balanceseekr : 05-29-2008 at 01:28 PM.
Reason: line spacing
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