The tree men came and chopped up his home. They took half the tree away — half his home. They weren’t good tree men. They didn’t even have a chain saw to do the job right. They used machetes. When they were through there were raw wounds and splintered stubs of branches everywhere on the tree.
We saw the squirrel come back at twilight and venture down a main branch that had been spared. He crawled down it very slowly. It was now all unfamiliar. He held on tightly with the claws on his hind feet and smelled everything thoroughly. “Where was this branch? Where was that branch, the one that took me to the next tree? I can’t get there this way. I’ll try up here.”
He sniffed the splintered end of a severed limb.
It was gone. He leaped to the only main branch left, climbed it, and crawled gingerly out onto a tiny branch that had escaped the tree men’s machetes. The thin branch sagged under the squirrel’s slight weight, and he scampered back to the main trunk. A pair of mocking birds flew in chacking to each other. They seemed lost and flew on. It was their tree, too.
The squirrel stayed for a long while hanging by his hind feet, his tail flicking. He put the whole new scheme of things into his computer. He’d make do. He scampered up the old familiar main branch and flung himself into the next tree. He knew that one by heart. — Ted Lewin, in his book How to Babysit a Leopard: And Other True Stories From Our Travels Across Six Continents (borrow free)
