Squirrel World (6 page)

“I hate this. I hate this!” Lenox screamed at me as he ran in circles around our limited space every evening when the sun was turned off and all the people were gone.

“Hating doesn’t change things,” I said finally, trying not to shout back at him. Lenox’s constant complaining did not make things any easier for me. I tried to think of one of my mother’s phrases. In the past, they
had always kept me going. I began reciting them quietly to myself. My wise mother had taught me so much: “
A nut in the jaw is worth two in the paw.” “Look before you eat.” “A leap in time is mighty fine.” “Don’t count your nuts before they are shelled.” “Don’t cry over a rotten nut.”

“Stop that mumbling. You’re driving me nuts!” shrieked Lenox.

“Driving me nuts.” I’ve heard humans use that expression, and it never makes sense. It makes even less sense when a squirrel says it, although I confess that Lenox’s constant whining and yelling did make me want to take a bite out of him.

“I’m trying to think of what my mother would have done,” I told Lenox. “There has to be a way out of this situation. If she were here, she’d have figured it out already.”

“But she’s not!” Lenox shouted. “You’d better hurry and do something!”

“Hold your fleas,” I told him. I had just remembered one of my mother’s sayings:
“Any squirrel who climbs up a tree can climb down a tree, too.”

“Now just what is that supposed to mean?” grumbled Lenox when I repeated it for him. “We don’t even have a decent tree in this place. Just these phony paper imitations.”

“When my mother said, ‘Any squirrel who climbs up a tree can climb down a tree, too,’ it was back in the days when my siblings and I were learning how to go up and down tree trunks. Going up always seemed easier to us. When we were climbing down, we were all terrified of looking where we were going.
We were certain we would fall.”

“We can’t fall here. We can hardly
climb
here,” said Lenox.

“Well, of course, I know that,” I replied. “But what she really meant was that if you get into a situation, you can get out of it.”

“That’s no help to us whatsoever!” shouted Lenox.

Well, it was no help to
him
. But I’d lived with my mother long enough to have learned that every saying has a second meaning behind it. Her words encouraged me to keep thinking. If we had gotten into this big glass-enclosed cage, we could get out of it. And an hour later, I came up with a plan.

“Listen,” I said to Lenox. “Why are we in here?” And then before he could say that it was because of me or because I was named
for Lexington Avenue or any other reason that he could blame on me, I continued. “We’re in this window as a display. People are coming to look at us. It brings attention to the store. But suppose instead of running up and down these phony trees, we acted as if we were fake, too? That would certainly bore everyone, and the people would go away. Then the store owners wouldn’t want us in the window any longer.”

“What do you mean, ‘act as if we’re fake’?” asked Lenox. “We’re real. We can’t be fake.”

“Of course we’re real. But you know in the park how they have all those statues? There’s the girl sitting with a book on her lap and the man with children around him. There’s a dog and a man riding a horse.
They’re made of metal, and they look real, but they’re not. They don’t move. We can pretend that we’re made of metal and keep still. If we don’t do anything, there will be no point in watching us.”

“It sounds easy enough,” Lenox admitted reluctantly. He was so used to complaining to me that he hated to give me credit for coming up with a good idea.

“All right,” I said. “That’s what we’ll do. Tomorrow morning when the people start coming and staring at us, we’ll hold perfectly still. Even when you breathe, try to be unnoticeable.”

“What about eating?” asked Lenox.

“No eating. Eat right now if you want to. But no eating while there are people around.”

Lenox immediately ran to search for one of the nuts that our captors threw into the window each day. He ate two nuts before he settled down for the night.

I ate one nut myself before going to sleep. I could hardly wait for the morning to come so we could set our plan into motion, or nonmotion, as the case was.

As soon as we woke, I reminded Lenox: “No moving.” Then I posed myself in front of the fake tree. Lenox went and sat near the park bench.

“This should be easy,” he said.

It was not easy. Have you ever tried to stand perfectly still hour after hour? People walked by the window as usual. They looked at us, and I noticed they were talking more
than ever. I blinked my eye, and I heard a shout from someone. I knew I had to be more careful.

More people came, and they all stared hard. It had become a challenge for them to see if we moved. I hoped they thought we were stuffed toys. I’ve seen many in the park being dragged about by little children—furry little animal toys with no power to move. I really hoped we would seem just like one of them.

“This is so boring,” said Lenox, dropping his pose and scratching himself. Immediately there were such loud cheers from the people outside that we could hear them inside our glass prison.

“Stop scratching!” I shouted, turning to Lenox.

“You’re moving!” he yelled back.

The people outside continued to cheer. I turned to face them and saw that for all my planning, we had managed to attract more people than ever before. My plan was an absolute failure.

“Any squirrel who climbs up a tree can climb down a tree,”
my mother had said. Back in my childhood, when I couldn’t grasp a tree trunk from one angle, I learned to change course quickly and shoot my paw out toward another piece of tree bark. If my plan didn’t work, then there was only one thing to do: devise another plan.

And after much thought, another idea
came to me. “Suppose instead of attracting good attention, we embarrassed the store owners?” I said to Lenox. “Suppose they didn’t want people to see us? If we did something bad, they’d want to get us out of the window at once.”

“So how do you plan to do that?” asked Lenox grumpily. He was angrier than ever since my first plan had failed. “We’re helpless. We can’t do anything while we’re trapped in here,” he said.

“Yes, we can. I’ve figured it all out,” I said.

“Just like you figured it all out before,” Lenox sneered.

“Stop being so negative, and listen to me,” I scolded him. “If we chew up these phony trees and destroy this make-believe world, it won’t look very eye-catching at all.”

Lenox stood in front of me and scratched his back. “Do you think that will really work?” he asked. His voice sounded hopeful instead of angry.

“We can only try, but I think it will.”

“Boy, are you dumb,” he said, reverting to his old manners. “Why did it take you a week to think of that? We could have been destroying these things since the minute we got stuck in here.”

I didn’t defend myself. I could have asked him why
he
hadn’t thought of this plan. I could have reminded him that for days he’d spent most of his time complaining. Instead, I saved my energy and set to work.

I climbed up one of the phony trees. I grabbed one of the fake birds that was sitting on a pretend tree limb, and I began to tear
it apart. Soon, even with only the little night moons lighting the area, we could see that blue feathers were floating through the air.

Lenox had been chewing on a branch, bending it so he could break it off. But when he saw the feathers raining down, he attacked another bird. This one was a fake cardinal, so the feathers that floated down were a bright red.

After we finished with the birds, I bit off all the flowers so that they lay on the ground. Lenox jumped into the newspaper that the phony human had been holding all these days. He made a huge hole in the middle of it. He jumped on one of the children and knocked him down. I jumped on the other. Then I grabbed a piece of the phony woman’s dress in my teeth and pulled
and pulled. Soon the dress was in shreds, and the woman had almost nothing on, which is actually the way some humans come to the park on very hot summer days.

All this activity made us feel good at first. At last we were doing something that might help get us out. But after a while, we both
collapsed with exhaustion. Neither of us had ever worked so hard in our lives.

“Listen,” I told my cousin as I lay on the ground surrounded by blue and red feathers, bits of newspaper, and broken tree branches. “We don’t have to do all of this now. We can do it during the daylight, when people are watching. Let them see how unhappy we are here. Let them realize that this isn’t a real world that they’re looking at. Squirrels would never harm birds or destroy trees or flowers. Neither you nor I nor any squirrel would ever hurt a human child. The people here at Nu-Tru Styles have turned us into a different type of animal.”

So we took the rest of the night off, sleeping to regain our strength. The next day we would continue the devastation in this cage of ours.

There was no way for Lenox and me to be aware of it, but our situation was not unknown in the park. None of the pigeons had reported our plight to our relatives. But one of the photographers who had taken our picture worked for a newspaper. And it was my guinea pig friend PeeWee, with his ability to read, who noticed a page with our picture and a long story about us.

After he read about us, PeeWee spoke to a couple of my siblings who live near his hole. They paid no attention.

“Don’t look for trouble, and trouble won’t look for you,” said one, quoting our mother.

PeeWee refused to give up. He searched Central Park until he found old Uncle Ninety-nine. Now my uncle had never thought much of my friendship with a guinea pig. He believed squirrels should stick with squirrels. He thought nothing good could come of my being pals with the fat, tailless creature who would be competing for the same food as us.

Luckily my uncle had a full stomach and sat still while PeeWee spoke to him. PeeWee had dragged the newspaper all around with
him. Of course, my uncle couldn’t read the words. But he could look at the photograph.

“It’s Lexington and Lenox!” he exclaimed in amazement when he recognized us.

“Yes,” PeeWee told him. “That’s what I’ve been saying. They went off on an adventure, and now they are captured in the window of this big store. It says in the newspaper that hundreds of people go out of their way to see the window, which has been called Squirrel World by the store owners.”

“Nonsense,” said my uncle to PeeWee. “
This
is Squirrel World, not that.”

“You’re right,” said PeeWee. “That’s why we have to help rescue them.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” my uncle said. “I’m sorry they were so foolish as to leave the park. But what can we do? Nothing.”

“We may not be able to do anything,” said PeeWee. “But the humans won’t know that. If we gathered hundreds of squirrels in front of the store, I think the humans might realize that Lexington and Lenox should be outside the window, too.”

My uncle sat thinking this over. “Do you think we’ll find anything good to eat along the way?” he asked. He’s a squirrel who is ruled by his stomach more than any other squirrel I’ve ever met.

“I’m certain of it,” said PeeWee, although he told me later this was not true. “I just knew I had to say anything that would get him out of that tree and off to rally the other squirrels.”

Anyhow, the lie worked. Uncle Ninety-nine leaped to a nearby tree and summoned
several of my cousins, who in turn called to others. Within an hour, there were 400 squirrels ready to set off.

PeeWee wanted to go too, but he realized that his pace was so slow he would never be able to keep up with the squirrels. So instead, he outlined a plan for the squirrels, the way a general would organize a battle. “Wait until dark,” he told my family. “If you travel at night, there won’t be people around to notice you. Stick close to the sides of buildings. Don’t dawdle. Keep moving.”

The newspaper article told the exact location of Nu-Tru Styles. And so at dusk that evening, the squirrels set off, knowing exactly where to go.

As I said, I knew none of this at the time. I knew only that when Lenox and I woke with
the morning light and looked around at the devastation we had created the night before, there were 367 aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and cousins staring at us through the glass and observing that mess, too. (The other 33 relatives had gotten lost or been distracted on their way to Lexington Avenue.)

The sight of our family delighted Lenox and me. It filled us with the energy we needed to return to our task. We immediately began chewing away at the scenery around us. By the time the street began to fill with humans moving in both directions, Lenox and I could see that there was a great deal of unusual activity. There were photographers, sightseers, police cars, and a white truck with those mysterious letters I’d seen on the signs the people carried outside the window:
A-S-P-C-A. I noticed that the truck had a picture of two dogs and a cat on it, too.

There was such a big crowd that a pretzel vendor set up business in the middle of the sidewalk and quickly sold his wares. Some people threw pieces of their pretzels down on the ground for our family to eat.

“It’s not fair,” whined Lenox. “I could use a pretzel myself.”

I ignored him. In fact, I’d gotten pretty good at ignoring his complaints by then. Someday, when Lenox looks to find himself a mate, she will have to be a squirrel who is hard of hearing or can master the art of ignoring his constant moaning and groaning.

In the midst of all this activity, we could hear the lock being opened above us. This meant that the sliding glass door would be opened and a fresh supply of nuts would be thrown into the window. We waited. The door opened, but there were no nuts. Instead, in an instant, we were both pulled off our feet and scooped into a deep net. I tried to keep my balance, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. And just as I feared the worst, the best possible thing happened. The net was
turned upside down, and I landed with a thud on the ground outside the window. And Lenox fell beside me.

We heard loud cheers and applause from the people who were standing around.

“Now what?” Lenox cried out above the noise of the crowd.

“Now we are free!” I shouted, because I had quickly realized what had happened.

“Hurray, hurray!” called out those aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins whose mouths were not filled with pretzels or an even greater treat that someone had just thrown to them—roasted chestnuts.

PeeWee had not given instructions about returning to the park, but it didn’t matter. Our relatives led the march, and the humans seemed to understand that they should keep out of our way. Police officers with loud whistles made the traffic actually come to a stop as we reached Park Avenue. It was amazing that all the cars and buses halted, and not a single life or even a tail was lost under the heavy tires.

By the time we were at Madison Avenue, I could already sniff the scent of the real
park—not a phony park with nothing real inside it. It was the honest-to-goodness best place in the world that I could smell. My home in Central Park.

After we crossed Fifth Avenue, I didn’t stop to say anything to the other squirrels. Instead, I raced directly to my tree and climbed up into my hole. Nothing had ever felt as wonderful as my nest with its woolen cap for a lining. Within seconds, I was fast asleep. It was dark night when I woke. I saw the moon shining through a cloud, and I lay in my nest, listening to the hushed park sounds: the leaves that moved in the breeze, the flutter of a bird’s wing as the bird resettled itself inside a nest. I heard the soft trudge of footsteps crushing dead leaves down below.

I climbed down to the ground. I should not have been surprised, but I was. There was PeeWee, waiting for me.

“Thank goodness you’re home again, and all is well,” he said.

“I’m happy to be here,” I told him. “Lexington Avenue is not all that it’s cracked up to be.”

“The street should be honored to have your name,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“I’m going to bed now,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

I smiled. How wonderful to know that in the morning I would wake again here at home, among all my friends.