Free Squirrel in the House by Vivian Vande Velde

Inside vs. Outside

    Another way that squirrels have a better life than dogs do—besides the whole tied-to-a-tree-with-a-leash thing—is that dogs sometimes have to go Inside with the people. Squirrels never have to go Inside.
    Well, we get to go inside trees where there’s a hollow, but that’s only if we want to. And that’s not the same thing anyway.
    Inside for dogs means even more rules than dogs have when they’re outside. Inside means no running around as fast as you want to, no digging, only eatwhen the people decide you’re hungry and wait for the people to tell you that you need to poop or pee. I know all this because I sometimes hear the man who lives with the dog explaining the rules. Sometimes he explains them very loudly.

    There are no rules for squirrels. Except for the obvious: Don’t let the owls catch you.
    (Dogs don’t have to worry about owls. Dogs think that’s because most of them are so much bigger than owls. I think it’s more likely that dogs don’t taste good, and that’s why owls don’t eat them.)
    So we squirrels get to run around as much as we want to, which is good, because we usually want to. We can dig wherever we choose, which usually means where we bury our food to hide it for later. We can eat whenever we want, so long as we remember where we’ve buried our food. And, of course, we can poop and pee as we see fit. The sense of that goes without saying.
    The dog who lives next door to my yard (which is bigger than his yard, by the way—not bragging, just saying), the dog tries to convince me he has it better. “It’s about to rain, squirrel,” he says, sniffing at the sky. “Master will bring me inside, where it’s nice and dry, and you’ll be all wet.”
    â€œI like rain,” I tell the dog. “Rain washes me off. You have to have the man wash you off with a hose and that stuff that bubbles and that he says smells like Tropical Sunset for Dogs with Sensitive Skin. I don’t know what tropical sunsets are, but I suspect only tropical sunsets are supposed to smell like tropical sunsets.”

    Sometimes the dog will say, “I smell snow coming. Do you like to wash in the snow, squirrel?”
    That just goes to show how not-smart the dog is. “You can’t wash in snow,” I tell him. “Unless it’s melted snow. And melted snow is water, not snow. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
    â€œBut snow is cold,” the dog tells me. “Too bad for you that you have to be outside in the cold.”
    â€œThat’s why my blanket comes attached,” I say, waving my tail in front of his face. But only when he can’t get any closer because of the leash. When snow comes, I wrap my tail around me in my cozy nest in the tree hollow. I’m as warm as I need to be.
    But I am curious. I can hear some of what goes on Inside through the walls. And I can look Inside through the windows.
    But sometimes I wonder what Inside feels like.

Outside

    One day the snow comes down very fast and for a long time. The wind blows from exactly the wrong direction: directly into the hole in my tree so that my cozy nest in the hollow is no longer cozy. The wind howls and whistles. The wind batters my cushion of dead leaves so that they crumble into bitty bits that make me sneeze. The wind ruffles the fur of my tail and wiggles its way into my bones.
    Because I’m cold, I cannot sleep. Because I cannot sleep, I grow hungry.
    The problem is: I’ve finished the last batch of summernuts and berries that I dug up and brought back to my nest. If I want to eat, I have to dig up another of my food hiding places.
    The other problem is: I’m such a good hider, sometimes I have trouble finding my hiding places.
    And meanwhile the snow is still coming down.
    Which am I more? I ask myself: hungry or cold?

    I paw through the scraps of this and that in my nest—nutshells,