Well, then, I’ll look for them.
I follow my ears to the doorway, through which I can still hear people-talk.
This room has a long table, and the other guests are sitting around it. “One, two, three—one time,” I count. But then I decide it doesn’t make any difference how many other guests there are. More than three. Fewer than during recess at school.
I stand in the doorway and call out: “Have any of you lost a smallish people child?”
The people keep talking to each other and don’t notice me.
The trouble is they’re noisy, which I can’t do anything about, plus I’m on the short side. Below their eye level. People have a tendency not to look up or down but only straight ahead. That I know how to fix.
There is a cloth, very similar to the curtain in the other room, but this one covers the table. The larger boy is sitting next to an empty space, which might be where the smaller boy is supposed to sit. I jump and catch hold of the cloth. Everything on the table shifts a bit in my direction.
The people all slam their hands down onto the table covering to keep it from moving, then turn to the boy and start telling him to behave.
He protests that he hasn’t done anything, but then he looks down and sees me hanging on to the cloth next to his leg. He jumps up so quickly that his chair falls over.
This gives me even more space, so I continue climbing up the cloth until I’m on top of the table. There’s lots more food here, which is tempting to a squirrel who hasn’t eaten in . . .
Oh, wait. I guess I’ve just eaten. But it’s still tempting. Even so, I tell myself now is not the time to get distracted—I’m on a mission. And I no longer need to worry about the noise level because no one is talking anymore—they’re all staring at me. Well, that’s convenient. I say, “Which one of you belongs to the smaller boy?”
One of the people screams, which is just plain rude, no matter how you look at it.
The man who lives here with the dog jumps to his feet, and he grabs one of the bowls off the table. He flips it upside down, which sends pieces of lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes and radish bits showering down on me. Then he tries to put the bowl over my head, but I zigzag and avoid him. Either he wants to make sure I don’t leave until I’ve eaten, or it’s that whole catch-a-squirrel-and-bring-him-home thing.
Except that I already am in his home.
People get confused so easily.
Anyway, I don’t have time for this. I run and bound down the length of the table, only occasionally landing in someone’s food, then leap onto the curtain—the real curtain, the one covering the window—and climb up onto the curtain rod. There, I take a moment to lick off the food that’s gotten between my toes. Yummy! I don’t know where people gather their food, but it tends to be tasty.
Meanwhile, the man has moved his chair against the wall near me, and he’s climbed onto it, so I jump onto a tall piece of furniture that’s made of wood and glass and that holds bowls and other people stuff. The whole thing wobbles, and the mother who lives here with the man and the dog really starts screaming now, no doubt worried that I might get hurt. But I’m sure-footed and make it safely across the top of that furniture till I can drop back onto the table at the end that’s closest to the door. The cloth skids along under me, carrying me and the food and bowls with it, but I jump a heartbeat before the whole thing slithers off the table onto the floor behind me. Several of the bowls bounce on the floor. Several definitely do not bounce. I run out of that room, through the long, skinny room, and back into the room where I originally started.
I sit and wait for someone to follow, so I can lead them outside.
Amazingly, no one takes the hint. Instead, I hear them—still in the room where they were eating—yelling such things as, “Oh my!” and “What was that?”
What was that? Really? Like they’ve never seen a squirrel before?
Then finally—finally!—someone points out that the smaller child was obviously telling the truth about a squirrel being in the house. And that it must have been the squirrel who caused all the damage in the other room.
Excuse me? That was the dog. And the man. And the two people children.
But in any case, they say the child has sulked upstairs long enough after being scolded for something he didn’t do, and someone needs to fetch him—while someone else needs to call Pest Control.
I think it’s pretty mean of them to call the boy a pest in need of control, but sometimes families can be like that.
Someone goes up the stairs to fetch him, and that’s when the fuss really begins—when they can’t find him.
They look upstairs and down. Two of them even walk right by me and open the front door, never noticing me standing right there, chattering, “I know! I know! I know where he is!”
The snow is still falling, falling, falling. The people say, “He wouldn’t have gone out in that,” and they close the door again.
These people are hopeless!
Hello, Dog?
How can I get through to these people that their second-smallest guest is outside and needs help?
I could jump on one of them, I think, but there’s always the possibility that if I do, that person will hold on to me, and eventually I’ll end up in a pink sparkly dress. I’m not willing to risk that. Girls can’t be trusted. Even girls who look like adults.
I run back and forth in front of them, but not close enough for anyone to catch me. The trouble is that at this point they have gotten more concerned to find the missing child than they are to catch me.
Why can’t they understand me?
Then it comes to me: I am a highly educated squirrel. These people aren’t smart enough to follow what I am trying to tell them.
What I need to do is find someone who is in between squirrel-smart and people-smart.
And then that answer comes to me, too: the dog!
The man said he was going to put the dog in the basement. I don’t know what “in the basement” means. Is in the basement like in one of the containers for holding food? I run back into the room where there was the food and those big metal things, including—I suddenly remember—the one with the window.
But the window is dark, and I can’t see anything even when I hang upside down from the handle. I tap against the glass. “You in there, dog?” I ask.
No answer.
No smell of him, either.
No, wait—there is. I sniff with my highly developed squirrel nose. There is a faint scent of the dog nearby.
I follow my nose to another door. “Hello, dog?” I call. “Are you in the basement on the other side of this door?”
There is a loud thump as the dog throws himself against the door. “Squirrel!” he barks. “Wait until I get my paws on you!” The door rattles in its frame as the dog hurls himself at it again. And again. And again.
It’s a challenge to work with someone who is so excitable. “Stop barking,” I tell him. “I need you to do something for me.”
“You,” the dog says in a sputtering kind of bark, “you need me to do something for you?”
I’m relieved that the dog isn’t as not-smart as I worried, that he can—in fact—grasp the situation.
“Yes,” I say.
“Oh, well, then,” the dog says. “Sure.”
I scratch my ear, trying to catch hold of a thought that flitters around in my brain. But it moves too quickly and is gone. “Okay,” I say. “Well, the first thing you have to do is, you have to come out from in the basement.”
The dog’s voice is a bit strained—I’m guessing because he’s so eager to help me—as he says, “Squirrel. The. Door. Is. Shut.”
“Yes, it is,” I agree. “Open it.”
The dog bounces against the door once more. “IT DOESN’T OPEN!”
Being a highly educated squirrel, I see the problem. “Back away,” I tell the dog. “There’s a hook latch.” I know about hook latches because some people use them on the sheds where they store their
squirrel food—in order to keep out the neighborhood cats. I climb onto the counter, then jump at the door latch. The hook pops up and the door opens. I say, “Ta-dah! Now you can help me.”
But that same thought that flittered before is hovering again, and there’s something about the look in the dog’s eyes as he stands there face-to-face with me . . . And I realize I never told him what I needed his help for, so—considering that—he agreed to help awfully quickly.
It suddenly occurs to me that I might want to a little bit of distance between me and the dog before I take the time to explain about the smaller boy.
The dog and I jump at the same time: He jumps at me, and I jump straight up.
I twist midair—squirrels are very fit and flexible, and we make excellent natural acrobats. So I go up, sideways, and down. The down is into . . . I don’t know what to call it: a container or a piece of furniture. It’s taller than the dog, but not quite half as tall as people. Inside is hollow and there are empty wrapper papers and eggshells and coffee grounds and a wad of used gum and some toast crusts—with peanut butter on them! I love peanut butter! It’s the best thing ever.
But before I can cram more than one crust inside my cheek, the dog runs at the container/furniture and knocks it over. Everything spills out—including me.
I race across the slippery floor, my feet going faster than the rest of me does. My plan is to go through the long room with the stairs and all the other doorways and to go through the doorway that leads to the room where I came in. I will go up the curtain and talk to the dog from there. I don’t think he has the proper attitude to listen while he’s chasing me. He’s doing that no-words bark and I doubt my words would sink in.
But a bunch of the other guests are standing in the doorway’s room. One of them is crying about the lost smaller boy, and the others are trying to comfort her—and there are just too many feet in my way.
I skid around a turn and change direction: I go up the stairs.
No Pets in Mother’s Room!
I know that the dog can’t climb trees, and I’m hoping he can’t climb stairs, either.
But no, I hear him thudding his way up after me.
I run into the first room I get to. Inside is a long, low, wide piece of furniture where I can see that the guests have laid their Outside clothes, like snakes who have shed their skins. I jump onto that, thinking I can burrow.
But the dog has either seen me or smelled me. He barks, “No pets in Master’s mother’s room! No pets on Master’s mother’s bed!”
The dog doesn’t listen to his own rule. He jumps up there with me and starts digging through the clothes, trying to find me.
I wiggle out and jump to a higher piece of furniture. This one has a ledge—which I figure the dog can get to—but also a tall mirror attached to the back. A mirror is like a window at night—you can’t see through it; it shows what’s on this side. There are mirrors at the school in what are called the restrooms. (I haven’t a clue about why they’re called that, so don’t even ask.) Anyway, this mirror has a wooden frame around it, and I can climb that if I need to go higher.
Meanwhile, the dog has still not discovered that I am not underneath the pile of people’s Outside clothes, even though he’s knocked most of them onto the floor.
We are wasting time.
“Hey, dog!” I call.
But he’s too intent on barking and digging through the clothes, and he doesn’t hear me.
On the ledge where I’m standing are all sorts of shiny things and containers. One of the containers has powder in it that smells—sort of—like Tropical Sunset for Dogs with Sensitive Skin.
I push the container to the edge of where I’m standing.
I shove.
The container goes flying, a blizzard of powder landing on the floor, on Master’s mother’s bed, on the Outside clothes and on the dog.
The dog coughs and sneezes and finally—finally!—for a moment isn’t barking.
I shout at him, “The smaller boy is outside! He’s hurt his leg! He has no Outside clothing on! It’s cold and windy and snowy, and the other guests are looking for him, but they don’t know where he is!”
The dog bites at an itch. He doesn’t agree to help me, but he doesn’t start barking again, either.
I say, “The boy is all alone in the snow. The people keep looking Inside, not Out.”
The dog looks frustrated. He wants to keep chasing me—he is, after all, a dog—but he asks, “The boy is Outside? Hurt?”
“Outside,” I repeat. “Hurt.”
My words reach the dog. He tells me, “It’s too cold for people to be Outside without their coats and hats and mittens.”
I say, “I think that’s what I just said.”
The dog says, “Someone needs to fetch him.”
I say, “That is what I just said!” And I jump down to the floor. I will lead the dog out the door, downstairs, Outside, and to the boy.
But suddenly the man who lives here is standing in the door to Mother’s room. He says, “What in the world—?” But he must decide he knows the answer to his question after all, because he stops asking and moves to block the whole doorway. He says, “Good work, Cuddles!”
I assume he means about finding me, not about all the clothing on the floor, or the powder on everything. Not to mention the eggshells-and-coffee-grounds trail the dog has left.
The man has a big net, like the children in the school yard sometimes use to try to catch butterflies.
Is there a butterfly in here? Usually they all go away for the winter.
I look around but can’t see one.
Then I realize: I am the butterfly.
With the man blocking the way out, I stand on the floor looking up at him. I can’t go to the left, and I can’t go to the right. It will do no good to go back and climb onto the mirror because the man’s net has a long handle.
So I go up.
I launch myself at the man’s knee, and then, before he can react, I climb the rest of the way up his leg, over his belly, across his chest, and up to his shoulder. From there, I leap over and behind him.
The man screams. He is just as loud and shrill as the little girls in the school yard, even though I’m already off and running toward the stairs.
“Come on!” I yell to the dog.
The man is still blocking the door. He has dropped the net, though, and he’s patting his body as though to make sure I’m not still on him.
The dog runs between the man’s legs.
Oh. I guess I could have gone that way, too.
To the Rescue
As the dog runs by me, I jump onto his back and grab hold of his collar. I’m a faster runner than he is, but I’d only have to wait for him to catch up. Besides, riding is more fun.
The dog lets out a high-pitched yip, which I guess means his coat isn’t as thick as my claws are long, but he doesn’t bark at me to get off.
Together we race down the stairs.
The cluster of guests hears the dog coming, and they get out of our way fast.
“How do we get out?” I ask the dog as we run to the front door. “Can you climb up the squirrel entryway?”
“The what?” the dog asks. “There’s no entry for squirrels.”
I can tell that he doesn’t want to admit there’s a door for me but not for him. “The long brick entryway from the roof,” I explain.
He shakes his head, which makes me—holding on to his collar—bounce alarmingly.
I say, “That ends in the pile of wood the man built to remind me of the trees Outside? So that I would feel at home? In the room with the floor like snow, except not cold?”
The dog doesn’t seem to be catching on at all.
I once more revise my estimate about how not-smart he is. “Where you were digging when you were trying to find me, before the man put you in the basement.”
“The chimney?” the dog asks.
Obviously, he’s just making up words to hide the fact that there?
??s a squirrel door.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “The chimbly.”
“No,” the dog says. “I can’t climb up there.”
I’d been hoping, since he did better with the stairs than I’d have thought.
The dog says, “But I know how to get out.”
He sits in front of the door to Outside and howls: “I gotta pee! I gotta pee! I gotta pee! Oh, boy, do I ever gotta pee! Somebody better let me out ’cause I gotta pee now!” He scratches at the door.
I say, “I didn’t think people could understand when we talk.”
He says, “They can understand this.” He increases the whine of his barking. “Oooo, somebody better let me out soon, ’cause I really, really gotta pee!”
The man’s mother hurries into the room, grumbling, “Of all the inconvenient times . . .” She calls over her shoulder, “Sonny, I’m letting your fool dog out before he wets on my rug.”
We hear the man running down the stairs, having finally gotten over my using him as a jungle gym. He shouts, “Wait!”
But by then the woman has opened the door.
She squints at the dog as he dashes Outside, carrying me with him, and I hear her ask in a scolding tone, “What have you got matted in your fur?” But I don’t know if she’s seen me, hanging on for dear life, or if she means her powder that he’s wearing.
The dog sniffs the snow that covers the boy’s footprints on the front walk. “Master’s mother’s powder is clogging up my nose,” he says. “I can’t smell anything else.”
“To the corner,” I direct him, “away from the school.”
It’s just as bumpy with the dog going over the snowdrifts as it was with him going down the stairs. Not that I would prefer running in the snow myself.
“Around the corner,” I say, “to the next corner. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
But I don’t need to. He sees the smaller boy, still sitting huddled on the sidewalk, and the dog puts on a burst of speed that actually shakes me off his back.