Frankencat Steps Out – or Pha Goes Feral

Part I

Some of you may remember my cat Pha (short for Alpha) as the endgame in the chess match I called “Squirrel Wars”, which winterwoman was kind enough to make a Guest Post on her beautiful blog.. In the second installment I called her Frankencat, because she was a monster toward the squirrels when tied on a long leash outside, which she begged to do whenever it wasn’t raining.

Well, last night this cute and cuddly creature decided to go wild and be Frankencat toward ME!

Some background on her might be of help. Now I’ve no notion of her breeding, except that she’s what some people call a lynx-point Siamese, really just an exotic name for a blue eyed, mostly light colored cat with dark ears and dark stripes on her haunches and tail. There’s no real standard I know of, and to call a cat a lynx-point Siamese is a derogatory term to real pure blooded Siamese fanciers, who believe they are just good Siamese genes ruined by indiscriminate breeding. They may be technically correct, but the two I’ve owned have been among the finest pets I could imagine, good-looking but not pretentious, loyal, playful and loving. What else could an ordinary guy like me want from a cat? Pha was two years old when I adopted her from the Humane Society, and all they could tell me about her was that she had just given birth to a healthy litter of kittens a month or two before. We’ve been together two years now, so she’s been a content, indoor cat for at least those two of her four years pre-Frankencat. Before that, who knows? Abused, neglected, Top Cat’s lady love in one of the neighborhoods? I have no clue.

She’s been a very undemanding housemate, content until this past month to sit on the window sills and stare at the birds and other critters (of which there are a variety) outside my small apartment. She’s a very, very finicky eater, but hey, to each its own.

Then along came Frankencat, which I admit I had a large role in creating. Now it’s “in and out, in and out” in all kinds of weather and all times of day or night. Something dormant has awoken within her, and she’s emulating some of nature’s most efficient predators, the larger wild cats. I think to myself sometimes “My God, what have I done?”

My health has been poor in the last year and I’ve had to take her to the kennel a lot while I’m in the hospital, but she’s always loved it there as Queen of the Cats, which is how they treat her. As Frankencat she was there for 5 days in early July, with no noticeable change in demeanor. She’s always glad to see me and happy to come home.

But ever since my parents’ beloved 14 year old Welsh Terrier had to be put down in early summer, I’ve been wanting to slowly introduce Pha to their house in the hopes that in time they’ll become close friends and maybe enjoy taking her for a few days now and then if necessary (did I mention good kennels are becoming expensive?).

Last night was to be her second visit to bond with Grandma and Grandpa. I packed up her litterbox after dinner and headed over in my car, a normally routine 15 minute drive for a cat that’s always been a good rider. Last night? Huh unh! I realized after one block that it was not Pha in the car, but Frankencat. She meowed, paced and shed like crazy, jumping from one window seat to another, giving me wild looks, and standing on my lap whenever I’d let her. Clearly she thought I was taking her back to the kennel, and I spoke to her soothingly, telling her she was a good kitty and we were just going “over the river and through the woods” to Grandmother’s house. After all, she’d been there once before and there were no problems. But she was wild with feline adrenaline and fear.

Finally we arrived, and I got her in the house with no problems; she even made note of where I put her litterbox in their sunroom. She started to sniff around the whole house and I breathed a sigh of relief: Frankencat had been temporarily tamed.

I went outside to check on my herb, pepper and tomato plants. Deciding some were dry and needed watering I filled a can with the hose and took care of that. I went to re-enter the house through the sliding screen door and never noticed an antsy Frankencat on the other side until the door was a few inches open. I’m here to tell you, mice have nothing on Frankencat when it comes to getting through incredibly small openings. I kept the door almost shut and started to bend down to tell her to back up when “Wham!”, she had squeezed through that little crack and past me like a greased pig.

In shock for a second, I stood there waiting to see what she would do. She sniffed lazily around a few nearby bushes and I thought “oh good, this isn’t too bad, I can get her”. I took ONE STEP in her direction and “See Ya!”, she sprinted to some nearby woods. This was around 7:15 pm.

I went back into shock, because I knew that after about 20 yards those woods opened up onto a sidewalk and a very busy highway where cars are routinely over the 50 mph speed limit. How street smart was she, I wondered? Before I got her, was she really schooled by Top Cat? She’d certainly been nowhere near a road or highway since I’d gotten her, and I could only imagine the worst. I tried to give it up to God for a few moments, but doing that with a loved one can be excruciatingly hard…

It’s All About Balance

I was lucky enough a few years back to serve as a Circlekeeper in a Restorative Justice for Juveniles program in Wisconsin. It required me to operate Peacemaking Circles as an alternative to prosecution of juvenile offenders in the formal court system. If you’ve ever read the book Spirit Bear you know just what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, here’s the short course.

Native Americans and other indigenous cultures around the world lived in close knit communities where everybody had a vested interest in the actions of others. Their spiritual beliefs centered around the ideas of circles, and in this country this belief reached its zenith with the development of the Native American Medicine Wheel. They had noticed that the natural world often came in groups of four: the four directions (east, south, west and north), the four winds, the four seasons, the four stages of life (infancy, youth, adulthood and old age), the four elements (earth, sky, water, fire). They perceived of such things as a vast, unending circle, with all parts connected to and complimenting each other.

Thus was born the medicine wheel, a round hoop, divided by string or animal tendons into four quadrants, representing physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health. It was their belief that a warrior on the good path had to keep all four of these areas strong and vibrant at the same time, or else the wheel would be unbalanced and sickness of some sort would develop. When an individual did something that offended the community, these peacemaking circles of elders, family members and other interested parties would gather to inquire into the health of the four areas and try to set the wheel in balance once again. Sometimes talking was all that was necessary; sometimes a form of active restitution was required.

(Interesting to note here that a bicycle wheel operates much the same way: if all the spokes are not properly tensioned the wheel wobbles and is said to be out of true, or out of balance. Wonder who first came up with the phrase out of true?)

At any rate, when these peacemaking circles gathered a “talking device” such as an eagle feather was used, and passed from member to member. Only the person holding the feather was allowed to speak, forcing everyone else to listen with attentiveness until the feather reached them and it was their turn to speak. (One can only dream about adopting such a practice into some of our local government and talk show show formats.)

The main point of these circles was to inquire into the offenders medicine wheel balance, and imbalance could come from any of the four quadrants. Perhaps someone’s physical balance was off because they’d become lazy and fat, no longer doing their share of community work. Perhaps their emotional health was impaired because they had deeply buried hatred or resentment they could not shed, or had such low self-esteem they kicked dogs and abused other animals; perhaps they had become mentally imbalanced as well from too much liquor or peyote or some other substance, or their ego had run amok; and, finally, perhaps they had become spiritually imbalanced because they no longer adhered to the teachings of the old ones or their personal practice of the sacred rituals had ceased. Whatever the case, as the talking feather passed around the circle, everyone had an opportunity to address these imbalances as well as ways to restore balance, both for the offender and anyone he may have harmed. Until white culture overran their efficacy, these circles kept the peace within individual tribes for hundreds of years and were in many ways much more effective than our criminal justice system today.

But my work in Wisconsin led me to the sad realization that such “communities” rarely exist in our culture anymore, red or white. Small pockets exist here and there, but generally we’re too isolated and afraid to get involved in some of the most basic situations. For example, if you were entering Wal-Mart and overheard a parent berating his or her child for no apparent reason, would you intervene? If a gang of boys was shouting obscenities at a poor solitary gay guy, would you speak up? Sadly, most of us would not, and would simply get as far out of the area as quickly as we could. As I traveled around Wisconsin I found it hard to find “elders” and other interested parties willing to participate in these circles anymore. This was particularly true with law enforcement and other juvenile justice workers, even those in the legal profession like me. They all thought it sounded good, like homemade ice cream from the past, but preferred the easier and more familiar products of the present. Less time, less uncertainty, less need to challenge their thinking. And the kids? It took them FOREVER to grasp what we were trying to do. We’d give them copies of Spirit Bear, which helped some, but for them it was mostly an alien concept, unknown to their older siblings and friends and only brought up in school by dedicated counsellors like my dear friend Suzanne Milkus.

So it’s kind of up each of us to tend our own medicine wheel balance now. Yoga, meditation, prayer, body scans, an active spiritual practice, reading, loving and empathizing with others are just some of the tools that have replaced the healthy community with a healthy sense of self. But it’s up to each of us as individuals anymore, unless we’re lucky enough to have found a new sense of community in a congregation of some sort.

But don’t be bashful either way. Go ahead and check those spokes as often as you can. We can get back “in true” with less effort than you might imagine. We were born with mind/body balance, so all we need to do is recover it.

Woodpecker

On Family Reunions

When I was growing up, all of the immediate family on my father’s side lived in Jamestown or Rochester, so one Sunday each summer we would hold a family reunion somewhere in Chautauqua County or up in Rochester. It was a big deal that everyone was expected to attend, especially if held in Jamestown, and the chairmanship rotated among the adults, who was expected to finalize the date, send out formal invitations and coordinate food and activities. They were usually held at someone’s house, but on occasion Panama Rocks, Allen Park or some other neutral site made for a nice change of pace as long as the weather cooperated. My father had a nice ski boat, so most of the ones I remember were held at my grandparents house where the boat was anchored and a dock allowed for swimming.

A 1950 Family Reunion Photo (click to see story).

These reunions are some of my fondest childhood memories. It was pretty well balanced between the number of adults and the number of kids, because we were the Baby Boomers and that’s how my parents generation worked. 2 or 3 or 4 kids to each set of parents was the norm back then, and it made for a solid group of kids to goof around with and play the formal games arranged by the chairman or his appointee.

The food was classic Swedish-American fare as I recall, and we always hoped for a nice day to boil sweet corn and barbecue hamburgers and hot dogs to go with the rice pudding and other heinous stuff the grandparents brought. Rainy days eating sausage, Swedish meatballs, rice pudding, scalloped potatoes and the like were the rare reunions I didn’t enjoy.

The games were the best part...

The games were the best part. There were egg tosses, water balloon fights, swimming in the lake, water skiing or tubing, endlessly imaginative things depending on who was in charge. One game stood far and away above the rest: the coin hunt. Each year, someone would get a big pile of sawdust from somewhere, spread out a tarp and then scatter the sawdust and a whole mess of coins in it. At the signal we kids were unleashed to go find the coins, with bragging rights to whoever found the most. The older kids usually won, but we all had the same chance at the same time and it was something of a melée. It was the best game I could imagine on Earth. The finale of these gatherings was usually a short speech by one of the adults on the topic of Swedish immigration and the importance of keeping ties strong between the Rochester branch and the Jamestown branch. Yada, yada, yada, we kids always thought.

Then came “The Big Change”. Older folks started dying, we started to reach the rebellious stage of the late Sixties, and suddenly The Family Reunion wasn’t the big deal it always had been. We started to choose not to attend, finding other, more important events fell on the same day. Some years they even forgot to buy the sawdust. Must’ve been a sad time for our parents, who all continued to faithfully attend, shaking their heads at the lack of commitment of us Boomers.

There was a brief resurgence in the late Eighties and early Nineties, when enough of the Boomers had children of their own and wanted to pass along the magic they remembered as children themselves, but by that time the dynamic had totally changed. Unless we had jet-skis at Long Point or some other sophisticated entertainment we ended up pretty bored, not sharing our parent’s memories of the immigrants struggle, only of reunions past and magic long gone. We’d disappear right after the food. The year I was chairman, someone brought a six-pack of beer, a first, and I knew we’d never have another real reunion again.

That was 20 years ago and my prediction has proven accurate. Our parents no longer gather as a group, and individual families are struggling to even get the original Boomers to all attend. They’re spread out all over the country now, and their children live in distant states making it difficult and expensive to visit even for one weekend a year. This year, for example, only my younger sister’s three children and their two young kids will be in town out of a total of 9 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even spouses of the original Boomers are exempt from attending these days, unheard of when we were kids.

It’s a changing world. Kids don’t often stay in their hometowns anymore, lured away by economic necessity or wanderlust or the high divorce rate among our generation. My parents would accurately say something vital has disappeared, and I think I know what it is. Our kids love us just as much as we loved our parents, but the shared memories of struggles through the Depression and World War Two do not resonate in our hearts, or theirs, and so the motivation to make the Reunion a high priority for the sake of family has dropped off their radar screens. If we want to know our family history we can find it on the Internet with Family Tree and other such programs. To organize an entire summer schedule around a trip to Erie or Jamestown or Rochester is just no longer in the cards.

Oh, my brother and sisters and I will hoot it up a bit with my parents and some nieces and nephews, but it’s all about old memories, not really making new ones. I’m sure it would be a bit different if ALL the grandkids could be here at once, because they’re wonderful young adults capable of making new family memories together, but I’m starting to doubt if that will ever happen for any reason other than a funeral or memorial service.

Yes, times have changed for the Great American Family Reunion. Hang onto your childhood memories, for they may be all you’ll get to experience anytime soon. One suggestion though: appoint at least one of you to be Keeper of the Flame, so those memories can always be rekindled if the cycle is completed with a newfound desire to share some of those common struggles and memories.

Woodpecker

Books, Books and More Books

Photo by Lochaven on Flickr

Most of you would guess that I love to read, and you’d be right. For all the disharmony in our major political, economic and religious institutions, and worldwide unrest, we still live in a most exceptional time as far as books are concerned.

Take, for example, the worldwide web, the greatest library in the history of mankind. The ancient Egyptians, whose library at Alexandria was one of the first Great Wonders of the World, and Thomas Jefferson, whose personal library was so vast that it formed the core of the Library of Congress after the first one was burned by the British in the War of 1812, would surely be wordless when presented with the ability of Google and other search engines to locate, reproduce and annotate virtually every publication ever produced on this planet. They would be in heaven. When I was in college and graduate school we were still doing almost everything the old- fashioned way via the Dewey Decimal System (you are firmly in middle age if you recognize that old method), but computers were starting to show up in the library. We just didn’t know or care to learn (no time) what they might be capable of.

Thankfully, the next generation did care, and expanded on those possibilities so much that decimals no longer matter; it’s all in the digits now, so much so that it’s getting harder to remember what it was like to spend a few hours looking for a particular article or book review on real bookshelves.

Then came the next wave of innovations: eBooks and iBooks and Kimbles and iPads. Now, you can not only find a particular book on the web, you can download it onto a device that let’s you either listen to it being read to you or actually read it like an old fashioned book displayed on the screen of your device. This latter capability is what has led to the increased screen size of products from Apple to Amazon to Sony, products which are slimmer, lighter and more versatile than the actual book could ever have been.

I’ve had an iPhone for several years now, and one of the first things I did was download a free application called “The Classics”, which initially contained about a dozen of the best books ever written displayed on the screen like miniature books you could read, bookmark and actually turn the page, with a built-in sound like a piece of paper being lifted and turned over. It was so cool that despite the small screen of an iPhone I found myself reading books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Robinson Crusoe, The Call of the Wild and Pride and Prejudice while waiting around doctors’ offices, automobile maintenance shops and hospital beds. This was perhaps the greatest distraction and best reading room of all: a hospital bed. I’ve been in a lot of them the past two years, unfortunately, and medications while necessary did not leave me so comatose that I couldn’t think. And if I think without the ability to move I get bored very quickly. Then (shudder) even the TV starts to call my name. But being allowed the use of my iPhone to read a good book, well, suddenly I was on a beach somewhere having a jolly vacation read and escape.

Now I also have an iPad, a larger device about the size of a minister’s Bible, which does even more to enhance the reading experience. Amazon’s Kimble and the Sony Reader are similar in size, but lack most other features of the iPad, which can access the Internet, operate email, function as an iPod, and do virtually everything the iPhone does, and more. About the only thing it doesn’t do is accept or place cell phone calls.

The reading experience on the larger screen devices is sublime. Pages can be oriented as two across like a regular paper book, or as one larger page at a time which you turn by touching a corner of the screen, audible sounds and all. The books available for download are virtually endless, and your personal mobile library is limited only by the free space on it’s hard drive. Really, it’s like shrinking the local library down to clipboard size so you can carry it around whenever you want. Endlessly satisfying and comforting to know that if you’re hung up anywhere, from the local airport to the barber shop, you’ve got good friends right on your lap, waiting for you to call. Oh, did I mention you can also get any number of daily newspapers, too? Yep.

Photo by PACMan3000 on Flickr

I will never get over the pleasure of holding a real ink and paper book in my hands; it’s a childhood memory thing. But there’s never been an easier time to find and read almost anything you want, from all over the world, all in one place, light, portable, and un-scribbled upon by some twit who had it out late before you could secure it.

Go for it. It’s hip to hold a square.

On the Matter of Hats

I have a small new collection of different hats I’ve been wearing lately.

But back in the Nineties every time my family and I travelled, and getting a cap was a relatively inexpensive way to get a souvenir of the various places we visited, each and every one of them at that time was a baseball cap, really, with a different set of colors and a different logo, virtually the same, and they all ended up hanging from nails around the garage rafters. I’d wear one hat all year when I really needed to, but the rest just collected dust. Sure, I had a specialty hat or two, like a Gore-Tex lined hat for really terrible dog hikes in the pouring rain, a cooler mesh lined one for canoeing or summer camping, and the obligatory ski hat, but these were for special occasions only.

Not so with my parents generation, or the one before. They cared about their hats the way we care about leather jackets. Look at almost any old photos from the Twenties through the Forties and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single man who wasn’t wearing some kind of hat, whether a classic bowler, fedora or whatever they called the non-cowboy straw hats (boaters?). Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, these men all wore these hats of various styles as a statement of elegant individuality. (I should note here that most women never stopped this kind of accessorizing, but their hats were just crazy Sunday things before and after Jackie, weren’t they?)

World Series, Griffith Stadium, 1925

Then came the Sixties, and unless you were a country music lover wearing a cowboy hat, or in the military, most everybody wanted to highlight “The Hair”. Hats showed up occasionally, but by and large they were “square”, man, just not where it was at.

The Seventies saw some growth in cowboy hats as a result of country rock, and a few baseball caps that were really about baseball, but it wasn’t until the late Eighties, when rappers found their particular groove, that all SORTS of billed caps started showing up in various states of angle and tilt. By the Nineties you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing some commercial product on the front of these hats; they were ubiquitous. And I think most guys were like me and wanted several, even if they never wore them. Only the few, the proud, dared emulate Indiana Jones.

This past decade has seemed to complete a cycle, and there are hat stores in nearly every big mall and in a lot of folks’ inboxes. I seem to get a solicitation from Hartford York hats via email at least once a week. You see them on the street everywhere now: berets, newsboy caps worn backward and forward, porkpie hats, homburgs (for the wealthy), fedoras, panama hats, and in all seasons, too: felt for colder days, straw for summer.

Personally I think it’s a great thing. Let’s hear it for the snap brims and the porkpies, the ivys, the casual hats, the dress hats and all the rest! I mean, why shouldn’t an enthusiastic gardener get and wear the same kind of neck protecting hat that birders and then fishermen down south pioneered? Why shouldn’t a guy feel un-self-conscious with a broad-brimmed straw hat to shade his eyes in the woods or in the grocery store instead of a baseball hat? Or wearing a nice felt hat out to dinner and a show three seasons a year? I’m tired of seeing “Tom’s BBQ” or such wherever I go.

Now these new hats are more expensive, no doubt, and I’ll not be lining my garage with them, ever, but they are a return to style and personality that are long overdue. Getting a nice new hat and breaking it in can be as satisfying as discovering your favorite and most comfortable boots or shoes.

So I say, it’s about time this hat thing came full circle. I don’t know what people will say in the future when they look at photos of the Sixties through the Eighties, when so few people wore hats, or of the Nineties when it was just a mass of baseball hats, but I’m willing to bet they’ll say “ooh, cool hats!” when they look at pictures of this coming decade, whether chilly or hot, inside, or on the outside, where WinterWoman works and plays.

Woodpecker

Squirrel Wars – Part III

Well, friends, I have run headlong into Occam’s Razor. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a scientific theory which states that in a complex problem the simplest answer is most often the correct one. Now, I thought about all sorts of sophisticated solutions to my squirrel problem: new traps, different bait, further adjustments to the trap I already had. Thankfully, I never once thought of poison for these beautiful creatures of God. They are the acrobats of our Great Lakes ecosystem, after all.

Pha, a.k.a. Frankencat

Instead, I have created Frankencat. As you may recall, my last act of desperation was to tie my cat, Pha, on a short leash outside. Well, she is now totally spoiled and the leash has lengthened to about 12 feet. With this heat wave she has become so totally spoiled that she spends all day out there. She’s not interested in the birds, and they come and go as they please; she couldn’t reach them up on the feeders anyway. But the chipmunks and squirrels, which are ground travelers, are in total shock. I hear their angry chittering from the trees and bushes, and believe me, so does Frankencat. While she’s out, not a single mammal has dared step foot in my garden or the bird feeders. I’m sure they steal down after dark for a snack, but it’s nothing like it was, for me or for Pha.

So there you have it. The simplest answer was to put something higher on the food chain in their way, but we humans think we’re smarter than that. I’m not sure who Occam was, but I think he was a very wise man.

Squirrel Wars – Part II

Sam: Can you believe that guy? What an idiot!

Photo by Jim Gilbert

Sally: Yeah, well, don’t act like the brave hero, Mr. “There’s a strange metal box, come save us”.

Sam: Yeah, but that guy can’t even SPELL!!! Have you ever seen anything so bad, you “fiend”? I mean, it’s like he never even HEARD of Spellcheck!

Sally: The funniest thing is he believes that silly cat on a string frightened us away all afternoon. We were just STUFFED!

Squirrel Wars – Part I

I love squirrels, their playful attitude and the way they scurry from tree limb to tree limb, but the past few days I’ve felt like Bill Murray in”Caddyshack”.

Red Squirrel - by Jeremy Martin

I caught one of the little red ground squirrels coming out of my bird box (where the wrens lived) with feathers in his mouth. Now, it’s bad enough that I can’t keep them from leaping from the fences onto any birdfeeder they want, but this was too much. I resolved to initiate eminent domain and execute a forced relocation.

Off to the hardware store I went, and came home very satisfied with a small animal live trap, which would let me drive the scoundrel to a park about a mile away.

Then I tried to set it up. Needing the skilled hands of a surgeon to get the tension properly adjusted, and lacking this skill, I fought with the aluminum contraption for at least half an hour before I finally decided I had it.

Round One: I positioned the trap under a tree they favor and waited for their chirping voices. It didn’t take long, and the guilty squirrel began a whole series of excited rushes and false charges, always stopping and running back up the tree. Finally he approached it slowly and my excitement mounted. But rather than enter one of the two doors, he kept up a sideways attack. Finally, he jiggled it enough to set off the trap, which sent him off up the tree for a long, long time. Good, I thought, maybe I’ve scared him away for good. Just in case, I moved the trap across the walkway and into one corner of my garden.

Round Two: about 5 or 10 minutes later I heard the chittering of my nemisis. This time he had brought a fiend, a smaller lighter version of himself, which I assume was his mate.

Can you imagine the conversation back at the nest?

“Really honey, there was a huge pile of that peanut butter-like stuff we love back there, but it’s inside some stange metal thing with doors and rods that scare me. I don’t wanna go in; come see.”

“Really Sam you are such a baby. But I’ll go look.”

The two of them came down the tree trunk, the male in the lead as if to say “uh oh, it’s moved, stand back.”

The female hesitated for about one second and then marched right in the trap door, took a good-sized hunk of the bait and then camly backed out before going back up the tree, pausing just long enough to look at hubby like he was a total wuss.

Hubby waited a few nervous minutes before repeating her moves.

Obviously, something was wrong with the trap, so I went out and checked everything twice, touching the bait tray with a stick and “boom!”, the trap doors slammed shut each time. My doubts about the tension of the rods and ability to read instructions let up just a little.

I told myself it was just a matter of time and waited…

Round Three: With the trap now in the garden I could watch even more closely what might be going wrong. But just watching and waiting soon grew boring so I went back to a good book I’ve been reading. I don’t know how much time passed, but suddenly out of the corner of my eye I spotted one of the dastardly duo doing what they seem to do best: hanging upside down on one of my suet woodpecker feeders gorging itself on some costly stuff I buy to keep my favorite species of birds frequent visitors. I was incensed! I jumped up from my chair and slammed open the screen door and yelled “Get out of here! Find some nuts! That’s bird food you rodent!

You’ll never guess what happened next. The squirrel, as it usually does, scurried down the pole, but did he/she make a bee-line for the tree, which they also usually do?

No. The impudent creature ran straight to the trap AND TOOK REFUGE THERE, running back and forth as if it was a fortress of protection!

That was it for me. Three rounds and out. I had only one ace up my sleeve. After shamefully hauling the trap back inside to ponder poor craftsmanship vs poor comprehension I did the only thing left: I strapped Pha into her harness and leash, wrapped the leash around a fence post and left her a little food and water.

I didn’t hear another squirrel “chirp” the rest of the day.

Today they won the battle, but the war us far from over.