  THE TRAGEDY. We had a very cold snap the last fortnight in January. Morning after morning the water, and also the milk, in the squirrel-house were frozen into solid blocks of ice. I did not worry. I thought squirrels were such hardy little animals. The year before, Bunty and Fritz had lived happily Little Peter, it is true, did often slip into the serge bag in the daytime; but the maid, drawing the curtains at night, annoyed and startled him, and he generally bolted for the cage. I consoled myself with the thought that he and Ruby would keep quite warm cuddled up together in the sleeping-box. And besides, was not Fritz exceedingly well and lively all the time out of doors? I saw them huddled together on the floor of the cage. See page 54. Poor little things! I don’t think they did sleep together. The box was partitioned inside, and I think each kept entirely to its own compartment; and Peter, being the male, would come off worst as to nesting material. I noticed that he was not well on the 25th January. The entry in my diary is: “Peter looks miserable, eats scarcely anything, and sleeps twenty-three hours and three-quarters out of the twenty-four.” If then I had only known! If I had kept him inside my room, furnished the serge bag with heaps of cotton wool, and never let him spend the night in the outside cage, I should in all probability have saved his little life. It never entered my head at this time that he had got a chill. I thought he was “out of sorts” with the approach of spring. I remembered that Bunty had seemed seedy early in February the year before, and that “Finger-sauce” always tempted her, whereas my poor, wild little Peter would never come near me. He would feed while I was in the room, but if I stirred so much as a hand would be off as fast as he could go. This was most disheartening after nine months’ captivity, and after having reared him from babyhood. There was something inherently untamable in him, and though I longed inexpressibly to mother and warm and coax him, I was powerless to make him better. His weakness increased, he became cruelly emaciated, and I was compelled to watch day by day the advance of a mortal illness. He would never eat from my hand, and though I put meal-worms into his food dish, he would not touch them. Sunflower seeds His fur was staring, and he never seemed to have strength enough to clean himself. All his little lickings and bitings and scratchings ceased. As the days passed he became more and more feeble. I only saw him for five or ten minutes in the twenty-four hours. He became painfully thin; his lustrous eyes were dim and apparently sunk in their sockets, instead of bulging out as all squirrels’ eyes do. What vexed me was my powerlessness, and his pitiful shrinking from me. When I tried to coax him with endearing words, and food in my hand, he would feebly scramble away from me and cease eating altogether. “Why, Fritz was perfectly well and strong out in the open, bounding about from tree to tree, and voraciously hungry whenever he visited the stump or the nut traps. Still I never guessed that Peter was suffering from a chill. “Squirrels,” I read in a natural history book—no natural history books tell one much about them—“squirrels invariably die of one thing, and that is inflammation of the lungs; and nothing can cure them—they die in a very few days.” It did not seem to me possible that Peter had inflammation of the lungs. There was no cough, no running at the nose—just emaciation and feebleness and loss of appetite. I gave him milk with sugar in it every day. He took a few tiny laps of it, and I thought it must be nourishing and helpful. I learnt afterwards that milk was one of the worst It was melancholy to see the effort it was to the poor little creature to climb back to his nest. He had to wait for breath and for strength four or five times before he finally disappeared. By the 14th February Ruby, who had hitherto kept well and sprightly, though she also slept twenty-three hours and a half out of the twenty-four—unlike Fritz, who was to be seen several times a day in the coldest weather—Ruby, to my great grief, began to exhibit the same signs of illness as poor little Peter had shown. Her coat became rough and staring, It was too pitiful to see them. Squirrels, as a rule, will rarely or never eat together—as one springs up another springs down. If these two happened to be feeding at the same hour, it was always in different parts of the cage or of my room. There seems a sort of etiquette about this, and it is never transgressed. But the day before my little squirrels died, I saw them both It may be asked, why did I not take them I believe now, looking back, that if I had done this I should not have lost them; but they were so nervous and shy, I was afraid of worrying and distressing them by changing their quarters. Unfortunately, the wall of my pets’ cage faced north. The winter sunshine used to I felt it cruel to disturb them—“Sick animals curl themselves up and sleep alone in the dark,” thought I, “and they will be best left unmolested.” Besides, as I have said before, Bunty and Fritz had lived all through last winter in the same place, and I did not imagine that it could be the cold that was killing these two, more especially as the cold snap was all over—February came in mildly. Fritz used to come bouncing in to pay me a visit in the highest health and spirits, and in the garden squirrel-house was there not the future Mrs. Fritz extremely lively? They Anything more different than a sick squirrel from a healthy one cannot be conceived. The eyes, instead of protruding like carriage lamps, become flattened and then sunk in, giving the impression of blindness. The whole expression of the face becomes altered from mischievous sprightliness, an intense vivacity, to a miserable, dumb suffering. The tail is never curled over the back, but hangs down dejectedly; the ears are far apart; and the movements, instead of being electric springs and jerks, are mere crawlings, and are evidently made with great difficulty, exhausting the poor little creature very much. I have watched Ruby, consumed with thirst, peer over from the edge of her box, and let herself go with a feeble bundling sort of slither down the pole always used for ascents and descents. She would leap feebly, with pauses To see animals suffer like this, and to be powerless to help, throws a black cloud over life for the time being. I longed for my pets to die, and wondered if I could chloroform them. Every morning on waking I hoped to find them gone. The end came on the last day of February, about five weeks after I had first noticed that Peter was not quite himself, and a little over a fortnight since Ruby had begun to droop. And here let me say, in parenthesis, that I had written to the authorities at the Zoo for advice. The reply I received was kind and I think it is commonly supposed that nothing can be done for sick squirrels because the first incipient signs of illness are not noticed and dealt with in time. On the morning of the day they died neither of them came out of the sleeping-box at all. So after a while, with a good deal of difficulty, I unhooked the box from the wall, and brought it inside. When I opened Ruby was too far gone to resist when I picked her up and slipped her inside a warm flannel cosy, with a hot water-bag under it. When I turned my attention to Peter, he suddenly leapt out and flew round the room in an agony of terror. He scrambled somehow up the portiÈre over the door, where he used to go to hide long ago in his babyhood, and then fell with a scream. He would not let me pick him up, but pantingly struggled out of my reach. After a time the poor little thing somehow found his way to the old serge bag behind the curtain. I tried to feed Ruby with warm sweetened milk, but scarcely a drop went down. Her little body was just skin and bone. She feebly snuggled away into the farthest corner of the cosy. And so the miserable day dragged on. Towards evening I thought I must try to get some food down Peter’s throat, for his strength in scrambling round the room had amazed me, and I did not despair of somehow pulling him round yet. He seemed sound asleep in the serge bag, so I lifted him down very gently, and sitting on the floor with the bag in my lap, I attempted to get a teaspoonful of milk near his little nose. But the moment I touched him he screamed and sprang out, biting my finger with extraordinary strength as I tried to stop him. To my horror, he tore up the window curtain with amazing rapidity and attempted to run along the pole, a thing he had not done for many weeks. But his strength gave out, he lost his footing, clung on upside down for a miserable second, then fell with a scream upon the hard wooden floor. With a look at me I shall never forget, he dragged himself I moved the piece of furniture and got him to drag himself out, and with a supreme effort to scramble into his box, which was on a chair close by. When I lifted the lid, a minute or two later, he was dead. He was curled up, with a queer little smile upon his face, as if triumphant that he had defied me to the last, and I—I could only be thankful that his sufferings and his terror were ended. Ruby’s eyes were glazing when I looked at her a little later, and she died quietly half an hour after Peter had breathed his last. I sent their two little bodies to be post-mortemed to a veterinary college in North London, kindly recommended by the Zoo people. The verdict was that Peter had died of acute congestion of the lungs, and Ruby of pneumonia, complicated by nephritis of some standing. People who love animals do not need to be told how remorse and grief poisoned my days for some time. Why had I, in my stupid human misunderstanding, sacrificed these little lives?—changed the existence of these blithe, merry little creatures into dumb, lengthened suffering? I was glad Peter had bitten me—I deserved it—and I hope it was some satisfaction to him to do it. Laurence hid himself in the twinkling of an eye. See page 75. |
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