“John, come quick! The cat’s got a long wiggly thing!”
I guess you can tell that my wife doesn’t like to get too close. As it turned out, Callie had caught another chipmunk. By the looks of it, it was dead — no longer struggling — and boy, did she want to come into the house with it. No way! In fact, I decided to see if I could take it from her, as it looked awfully big, and the poor animal was probably loaded with fleas.
Amazingly, I was able to retrieve it, despite the cat’s ferocious growling. Yes, there were big brown fleas all over the warm carcass. I didn’t see any visible wounds, but the animal wasn’t moving, and I assumed it was dead. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to treat it like I would a dead mouse, say, by flinging it as far as I could or dropping it into the dumpster. I don’t know what it was, I just couldn’t, so I fetched my shovel and dug a small hole off on one side of the yard. There were ants everywhere, big red and brown ones, biting like crazy. I stomped up and down, took off my Crocs and shook them out, and then I laid the chipmunk in the hole. Just then it moved its mouth and convulsed a little. I told myself it was just a muscle contraction and quickly filled in the grave.
All at once I had an empathy attack: what if the animal wasn’t dead but only in shock? Suddenly I was the chipmunk down in the hole, with all that dirt pressing down on me. I dropped to my knees — ouch, damn ants! — pulled the critter out by a foot I saw poking into the air, and took another look: its mouth was moving, all right, but I couldn’t detect any breathing. The ants were making me rush: this guy has to be dead, I told myself, and put him back in the hole, quickly shoving the clods in over the animal with my foot. Nice try, but it didn’t work! Once again I had to drop to my knees and pull him out. I wiped the dirt off as best I could, shook him to make the ants drop off, and stared at his little chest again: no, no breathing that I could see, but once more its mouth opened and closed. This was almost too much to bear.
The body was still warm. Shouldn’t it be cooling down after five minutes, I asked myself? I remember that when my father died, his skin felt cold almost immediately. Besides having his bones turn to jelly, that was the other way you knew he was dead. But the chipmunk might still have a chance, I figured, so I did the best I could under the circumstances, which meant I laid him carefully on his back in the upper portion of a tall sagebrush bush. I had to get him the hell away from the ants and put him where the cat couldn’t find him, and in that I succeeded.
Afterwards, I went into the house to finish a computer project and then practice my electric guitar. I hardly even noticed that there was a torrential downpour while I was playing (couldn’t hear it, of course), and then I remembered the chipmunk. Uh-oh. Maybe he drowned, I thought, or maybe the stimulus of the cold rain splashing down onto his scrawny little belly woke him up. I still don’t know, obviously, because I keep forgetting to step outside and look.
The shovel is still close by, though, in case he doesn’t hitch a ride with a passing coyote tonight.
No related posts.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I hope you eventually checked on the poor little critter. Right now chipmunks are on my “bad” list, because they climb into the tree and eat all the suet out of the bird feeder. Greedy doesn’t begin to describe them.
We have to rescue birds that stun themselves flying into the windows before the cats find them.
The less said about the poor little critter (and several more in the same shape), the better.
I’ll just use one word: ants… The most recent casualty was only half a casualty. The rear half, yes, left on the doormat.
Around here, cats eat a lot of hummingbirds, too. What a world.