More About the Squirrels :: PART I. MORE ABOUT THE SQUIRRELS.

PART I. MORE ABOUT THE SQUIRRELS.

St Katherine’s. Hook Heath.

MORE ABOUT THE SQUIRRELS.

As I am often asked about the little beasts whose adventures were set forth in “How I Tamed the Wild Squirrels,” perhaps a further account of my furry friends will not come amiss.

I no longer keep any of them confined. After the death of three in the winter of 1914, I resolved that, dear and fascinating as they were as little companions in my room, I would never have them caged and in artificial conditions again.

There are two pairs of Germans loose in our little wood—Mr. and Mrs. Fritz and Mr. and Mrs. Laurence; while the wild Surrey ones, the little natives, come to the garden from the firs on the railway cutting.

There is no doubt that Fritz, the German, with his superior strength and masterfulness, drove away that first little colony which I had tamed so wonderfully. Toto had met a tragic death, killed by a marauding cat. Tito and Tara and the dainty little thing I used to call Miss Fritz after a time took up their quarters elsewhere. I have since come to the conclusion that Miss Fritz was not Miss Fritz—more probably Miss Tito. As she grew to maturity she proved herself entirely a Surrey squirrel. There was no tint of orange or gray about her, and she remained when full-grown as small and dainty as the rest, showing not a sign of the German larger, coarser breed.

Besides, had Fritz been her father, she would not have disappeared from the wood. Young squirrels remain with their parents, I am told, for a year. Fritz had been assiduous in his attentions to a very charming squirrel with a lovely tail, whom for some time I had called Mrs. Fritz, but she too vanished in September 1913 and left him master of the wood.

He became very lonely. It was poor fun to be cock of the walk when there was none to dispute his sway. Consequently, during the autumn, he took to visiting Wych Hill, Hurstgate, and Allen House, where the owners, also admirers of squirrels, were in the habit of hanging out cocoanuts and other dainties to attract them.

It has always been a mystery to me how he contrived to get to these plantations across the heath without being seen. To reach them he had to cross two wide public roads bristling with motor cars, bicycles, errand boys, and dogs. Besides crossing these dangerous zones, he must (unless he went a circuitous route by fir trees, quite a mile round) have traversed an open gorsy heath. Had he his little runs, I wondered, as rabbits have? And how dangerous, with watchful cats and lynx-eyed terriers about! As long as he could keep to the trees he was safe from the latter, but there was no consecutive belt of trees from our place to those I have mentioned. That he arrived there, there was no doubt, for I sometimes found him there myself, and he would come running down the pine trees at my call. Neighbours told me of his fugitive appearances in their gardens: “A large, red squirrel, very strong and active.”

Occasionally he stayed away from us altogether for a week or ten days. Sometimes the food which was placed for him would not be touched, at others it disappeared at midday, showing that he had slept away and come over for it somewhere between eleven and twelve o’clock. When a longer time than usual elapsed without a trace of him in wood or garden, I was perfectly miserable, thinking that the dear, bright-eyed, clever little thing had at last fallen a victim to boys or dogs. And then the joy of his reappearance at my window, as intimate and cocky as ever!

I remember one morning in particular, a soft, sunny, spring-like day in winter, I came into my room to find him, after an absence of more than a fortnight, very hungry and very pleased with himself. He cocked his tail on one side with a rakish air, and pranced over the carpet and up the curtains, in the way he used to do when courting Bunty a year ago, and showed, with all his little squirrel nature, his affection and pleasure at our meeting again. I stuffed him with every dainty I had till he could eat no more, and insisted on hiding the rest in the ivy on the wall, where, as I knew, mice would steal it when night came.

Meantime Peter and Rufina lived in the big cage on the wall outside my other window.

They never became friends. As I have said in my former book, by the time the latter had been a fortnight in the cage she was completely mistress of the situation. She appropriated Peter’s sleeping-box, she stole all his best nuts, and should he dare to approach her while she was eating, she routed him fiercely. He was thankful when the short winter day was over, and he could sneak behind the curtains in my room and snuggle into his blue serge sleeping-bag, remaining there till next morning.

I must explain that Peter was a little English squirrel, whom I had reared from babyhood. He was now about nine months old. Rufina was a lady, German, bought from Devon and Co. at Bethnal Green. At this time I had had her barely three months.

Squirrels hate a high wind. The noise in the trees makes it difficult, I suppose, to hear enemies about. Also perhaps they fear to lose their hold of the tossing branches. Be it as it may, I was always certain that in a gale not a glimpse of a squirrel would be obtained all day. Torrents of rain, too, will deter them from scampering about; their tails get bedraggled and heavy and upset their balance. I have known Fritz come in the rain, but it generally meant that the weather was going to clear. I have seen him out in a wild snow squall. He spent a quarter of an hour once on the roof of the garden squirrel-house trying to scratch his way in through the heather thatch where a rival lived, while the snow was falling so thickly I could scarcely see him.

Young squirrels are very playful, and I think they amuse themselves with toys.

I shall never forget my astonishment at one of Rufina’s achievements. There had been an empty mouse-trap in my room for some weeks. It was five or six inches long and two or three inches deep, made of wood, with a wire top. It was not baited, and I had carefully unset it in case Peter or Rufina playing about the room should put their noses inside and get nipped by the spring. The father of a mouse family had once been caught in it, and I had had some very miserable moments; but that is another story. Ever since that tragic night his widow and children had carefully avoided it. Still, it lay under a cupboard, forgotten. One day I was surprised to see it on the floor of the squirrel-house. I wondered if the housemaid had thrown it out, meaning to take it away, and had forgotten it. The evening, however, was closing in, and I left it alone, intending to remove it next day. Early the following morning I was awakened by extraordinary sounds in the cage, a bumping and a scrabbling quite unaccountable, punctuated every now and then by the fall of something on the floor. When I got up to look, I saw Rufina in the act of climbing up the wire netting with the trap in her mouth.

I watched her. She gave me a backward glance, as much as to say, “Don’t you interfere,” and recommenced her haulings and tuggings. She dragged the thing some four feet up, and then along a wooden bar till she got below the little platform outside the sleeping-box. Then she made a spring, but lost her hold of the trap, and down it came clattering to the floor. What could she want it for? It was no good as a receptacle for storing nuts, as the spring door was closed, and the wires were too closely set for it to be possible to push anything through them. I came to the conclusion that she meant to place it somewhere as a barrier to circumvent Peter.

The whole of the morning was occupied by the persistent little creature in efforts to get her plaything up to where she wanted it. It fell to the floor quite a dozen times, but she tackled it again, every time with unabated energy. I questioned the housemaid as to why she had thrown it into the cage, and found that she had never touched it. Rufina must therefore have dragged it from under the cupboard, across the room, and by a great effort jumped with it in her mouth to the level of the window-sill, about two and a half feet from the floor.

By the evening, however, it had disappeared, and I descried it at last in the very topmost corner of her home. It was above the sleeping-box, wedged into an old bicycle basket, which was nailed under the eaves. This had some hay in it, and was used for hiding nuts. Did Rufina place it there as a shield against Peter’s thefts?

After a day or two the trap fell down again, and I took it away, afraid lest a little paw might be caught and wedged between the wires.

When Miss Appleton kindly undertook to illustrate my first book about the squirrels, though she stayed with us several times in order to sketch Fritz and Bunty from life, it was found necessary for her to have a squirrel model in her friends’ studio in London, where she was working at the time. A wire-netting place was therefore improvised on the roof, outside the high studio window in Kensington, and in due time came a package from Devon and Co. labelled “Live Squirrel.”

The lady artists who owned the studio were delighted at the idea of having this little pet, and, in Miss Appleton’s absence, proceeded at once most incautiously to open the box. They prised one end open, and were going to bring it to the door of the cage they had prepared, when hey! presto! there was a flash, a scurry of fur upon hands and arms, and away went the squirrel helter-skelter over pictures, statuary, easels, chairs, and shelves. Crash! crash! bang went glass, smashing to atoms, down fell pictures, over went models, and a wild and exciting uproar followed. The artists shrieked, the squirrel sprang here, there, and everywhere in a fifty by seventy feet room crammed indiscriminately with painters’ and sculptors’ paraphernalia.

Inarticulate with laughter, the ladies sprang after it. Faster and faster it flew, taking wild leaps from the top of one easel to another; pattering swiftly over angels’ wings and Mercury’s helmet, over Clytie’s bust and the horns of Mephistopheles; diving down to the floor, scrambling up the walls, till dismay arose as the bewildered creature jumped upon the stove and ran along the hot-water pipes.

More than an hour was spent in this breathless chase, till some one bethought her of a tiny room across the vestibule. Setting the door open, the frightened little beast was at length chased into this, and the door shut. A model’s cloak was flung over the runaway and twisted round the struggling bundle, which was transferred to its future home.

The ladies of the studio were great admirers of Mr. Laurence Housman, so the new arrival was named after him by common consent.

Laurence spent the following four and a half months (from the beginning of November till the middle of March) in a cage about three feet by two, which was fastened against a chimney-pot on the roof.

I have often wondered what his nights were like, with London cats all round.

He was furnished with a sleeping-box, with a hinged lid. I once saw him asleep, as my friend opened the top. Anything neater and warmer could not well be imagined. Wood-wool was tightly wedged round the inside of the box first, then came a thick layer of cotton-wool, all of which he had arranged himself. In the middle, a curled red centre, lay the squirrel fast asleep, his face completely hidden. The box lid fitted tightly down over this compact mass, and the two little holes at either end, through which he crept in and out, were so small, I wondered how he could get any air at all.

When I went away for the Christmas week of 1913, I could not leave Peter and Rufina the run of my bedroom. The house being shut up and empty, with no one to see after them, they would have made hay of all my possessions. So I hung the sleeping-bag on a nail on the wall inside the cage, and shut and bolted the window, giving Smithers, the gardener, instructions to feed them and replenish the water-jar from outside; this he was accustomed to do by means of a ladder. He told me that Rufina sometimes jumped out of the bag when he put his hand in to scatter nuts; so poor Peter must have been forced to give up even this pet hiding-place.

When I returned from Devonshire on 1st January, both squirrels were invisible. As the weather was bitterly cold, I was a little anxious when night came on lest their jar of water should be frozen; so I opened the window, and, finding a solid block of ice, I took the vessel in and replenished it. I mention this, as I fancy my action was the cause of the tragedy which followed. The casement opened backwards upon the inner wall of the cage, against which, upon a nail, hung the blue cloth bag I have spoken of. The casement would just touch this bag and shake it, though it was protected a little by a branch of the shrub which grew up through the cage.

I did not guess that Rufina was asleep in the bag; the night was pitch dark. I saw nothing, and closing the window again, went to bed.

The snow was falling so thickly I could scarcely see him. See page 24.

Next morning, hearing a tiny pattering about eight o’clock, I got up to peep and see my little pets. What was my astonishment and distress to see Rufina’s little form dangling, stiff and cold, from the platform against the sleeping-box. Above, there glared down upon me the horror-struck face of Peter, with eyes starting out of his head, and ears frantically bristling. Only for a second, for, catching sight of me, he bolted precipitately. I opened the window, jumped on the sill, and stretching up as far as I could, felt Rufina’s little body. It was quite stiff and quite cold. Her head was caught and jammed between the platform and the sleeping-box; there was the space of a couple of inches or so between the two. It seemed an inexplicable thing that a squirrel should get its head into an interstice from which it could not withdraw it, or that, having got its whole head in, it should not have been able to draw its shoulders after it.

I think and hope that in her struggles she may have broken her neck at once; she had no purchase below with which to help herself. The accident could never have happened in the daylight. I was convinced, upon reflection, that my opening the casement overnight had startled her into jumping out of the serge bag, and that she had blindly made for the hole in the sleeping-box some three feet above. She must have missed the perch from which she always scrambled upon the platform, and from thence to the nest.

This nesting-box and platform had been in the same relative positions for a year and a half. No other squirrel had jammed its head in between them; nor would Rufina have made the mistake had she not been in the dark, and blind and stupid with sleep.

These conclusions came to me afterwards. For the moment I extricated the little body with difficulty from the death-trap, and tried for nearly an hour to bring back life. So amazed and puzzled was I at first that I could not believe she had hanged herself. I thought she was merely frozen; for it had been a bitterly cold night, with ice everywhere. I brought her to my fire, and strove by moving her little arms backwards and forwards to bring breath back into the lungs. I chafed her tiny close-shut claws; I held her by the fire, and rubbed her beautiful little body. She was in such perfect condition, and so exquisitely clean and sweet!

When all hope was abandoned, I laid her gently on the floor of the cage to see what Peter would do, and whether he would show any sign of grief. At sight of me at the window he fled, wildly jibbering, stamping his feet, and screaming. Here was fresh lead on my heart. It was bad enough to lose Rufina, but that Peter should look upon me as her murderer was the sharpest cut of all!

He was angry and horror-struck, but by no means grief-stricken, however, for a few minutes later I heard him cracking nuts, busy over his breakfast.

To most of us when a tragedy like this happens, the feeling is “to have no more pets.” But Rufina had never been what Bunty was. She had never sat on my hand, or played with me, or come at my call, or nipped my fingers to make me quicker. She had not won her way into my heart as that first little Surrey squirrel had done. She had, it is true, just begun to come into my room and eat fearlessly, and I had had great hopes of winning her confidence as spring came on. But this hope was now shattered.

It was dismal to have nothing to play with. Peter continued so angry that he would not let me see him. Moreover, my plan of a mate of his own nationality for Fritz was frustrated. I had resolved to let Rufina loose with him in the wood when March arrived, and here was the blunt and miserable end to all my hopes of little ones.

A week or so afterwards, therefore, found me inquiring of Messrs. Devon and Co. if haply they could find me another German female squirrel, warranted young and healthy.

In a few days Ruby arrived. We had missed meeting her at the station, and the little package came by the midday delivery van.

I expected Peter to be much annoyed by the advent of this new trespasser in his domain. He had never for two minutes been on friendly terms with Rufina. In fact, to judge from squirrel signs and tokens, he hated her; but the same day that Ruby arrived, we found the two amicably cracking nuts together.

The newcomer was very red, as Rufina had been when she first came in October. I was a little surprised at this, for it was now winter—January 1914—and Rufina’s coat had long since taken on a lovely pearly gray which, with the undergrowth of red and an autumn tail, gave her quite a distinguished air.

Ruby was a dear little kittenish creature, very fond of play. She was dreadfully afraid of me at first, and much too suspicious to venture inside my room. The sight of me at the window sent her flying into the safe shelter of the sleeping-box, and once there she would, like all the others of her sex, swear at Peter, and dig her little claws into his nose if he tried to get in too. After a week or so, however, he was allowed to get in at the back entrance, and though there were always some expostulations, he was not turned out.

She would come into the room when I was not there, and eat her fill of nuts on the inverted lid of the clothes-basket. The weather was quite mild just then, and she seemed to like her quarters better than any of the former new arrivals had done.

She had a dear little face, a lovely red coat, and a beautiful plumy tail. She kept herself exquisitely clean, and spent a good deal of time over her toilet. Naturally, it being the depth of winter, she spent a great many hours asleep.

It is evident that caged squirrels sleep a great deal more, especially in winter, than when they are at large in the woods. Fritz was constantly to be seen, at least twice a day for a couple of hours at a time, bounding about the trees. And I used to notice the wild ones, the year before, very active even in the snow. A biting east wind would keep them snug in their nests, or a cold pitiless rain continuing all day. Otherwise they were nearly as active in winter as in summer, with this great difference, that whereas in summer 4 a.m. would find them at my window, their morning toilet finished and their appetites keen, in winter they did not appear at all till between eight and nine o’clock, and by 3 p.m. they had curled themselves up for the night. In the summer, I have heard them cracking nuts at 8 p.m. I think they all sleep from about 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., winter or summer.

I often came upon Fritz having forty winks, on a comfortable branch sheltered from the wind, in the daytime. Squirrels’ claws are so strong and flexible, and cling so firmly, that there is no danger of their falling from any perch, awake or asleep.

It was very interesting and amusing to watch Ruby as she became more and more used to seeing me about. I would open the casement into the squirrel cage, and go back to bed and watch. This cage was built on to the wall outside my window; it was five or six feet high, and about three feet broad, with a good wooden floor, and what made it delightfully home-like for squirrels was that an evergreen shrub grew inside against the wall right up to the eaves. Ruby would clamber down the central pole, which, with perches nailed upon it, made a capital substitute for a tree trunk, and would come peeping round the casement, to look for nuts which would be on a chair, or on the tall clothes-basket near by. Her little pointed ears, with their pretty tufts, would be sharply cocked, her whiskers quivering nervously, and her tail erect but turned back at the tip in the form of a query. Then as I made no sign of movement she would gain confidence, and venture farther in. When she got a nut and sat up to eat it, breaking the shell so cleverly in two halves, and keeping one half in her paws as a little cup, while nibbling it her ears would come close together, and her tail would curl comfortably right over her dainty little head. She was a charming picture as she sat up, showing her snow-white waistcoat, holding her food between her wee thumbs, her little jaws going like lightning, her brilliant eyes keeping a sharp lookout towards my part of the room—ready to vanish in a second should I dare to move.

And then would come another nervous and anxious little face; this was Peter, hoping that there would be something left for him. But Ruby would scold and grumble; and he, silently withdrawing, would wait till her ladyship had finished.

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