When I was in junior high and high school, we had a dog
named Misty. She was a Terrier and Poodle
mix, for which my father always called her a Toodle. She was small with sort of shaggy black and
white hair, and she was the most peaceful dog you ever saw. That is unless she saw a squirrel in the backyard. She had a particular aversion to squirrels,
considering them intruders who needed to learn their place…which was not in her
backyard. She even went so far as to
hunt them, lying in wait in the tall grass for hours, waiting for one of them
bold enough or stupid enough to venture too far from the safety of the tree.
We had a huge Ash tree in our backyard that had split into
three or four separate trunks about three feet off the ground. One of the trunks sloped gracefully outward a
little before turning and heading upward to the sky. At the base of these trunks, there was a
space big enough for a human being to climb into, and it didn’t take Misty long
to figure out that she could actually claw her way up the side of the tree and
into this space.
So, one day she was out stalking a particularly arrogant
squirrel. He would creep away from the
tree, looking right at Misty the whole time, daring her to try to catch him. Slowly, slowly getting further and further
away, confident that he’d be able to beat her back to the tree. Misty waited, patiently, for the exact right
moment, and when it came, she tore off across the yard like a bullet. It took the surprised squirrel a few seconds
to register that that black and white streak blazing toward him was not a good
sign. He jumped straight up in the air,
did a 180-degree turn, landed, and took off for the tree.
To his credit, he made it to the tree first. To his detriment, he didn’t realize that
Misty had learned to climb the tree too.
Without even slowing down, she launched herself into the air, covering
half the distance up the side before her claws even touched bark. Clawing the rest of the way, she shot into
the space at the base of the trunks, scaring the over-confident squirrel, who
had enough instinct to dart up the gently-sloping trunk. However, Misty didn’t stop in the space
between the trunks, and used her momentum to barrel right up the trunk after
the squirrel. He just managed to get
away, as she nipped at his tail.
Suddenly realizing that she was in fact a dog, and not a
squirrel, Misty was forced to retreat back down the trunk to the space at the
bottom. But I swear she had a smile on
her panting face, as she watched that a-lot-less-confident squirrel scamper to
the Pecan tree next door.
