Yesterday we were delighted, as always, to be confronted by Stumpette. She has taken the place that Stumpy used to occupy for us, in anticipation of an encounter, the delight of observing how he would interact with us, and our response to his expectations motivating us to continue to bring with us bags of peanuts on our daily ravine strolls, because of his sense of personal entitlement and his boldness in approaching us.

Stumpy and Stumpette had much in common, although their personalities are quite different. She lacks his boldness, though not his overt sense that our presence in his environment required that we offer tokens to him of our appreciation of both his antics and his tolerance for our encroaching upon his home in our daily excursions.

They are -- were, in the case of Stumpy, our original friend, whose presence we have missed for two years, and whose friendship we prized for the previous six years -- both small black squirrels. And each of them absent a tail. Presumably because, in the nest when they were newly born, they had become twisted together with those of their siblings, and nature's solution was to have one nibbled away so all could survive. I recall friends who used to operate a wild animal shelter informing me years ago that they would on occasion receive such nestlings and have to spend frustrating hours trying to separate the intertwined tails.

We named our little black tailless friend for obvious reasons, differentiating him from all the other squirrels that abound in the wooded ravine. And when we had made a tentative acquaintance with the second little black tailless squirrel years after our initial introduction to Stumpy, our granddaughter had named that little creature Stumpette, on the assumption it was a female, a conceit that we have maintained in the subsequent five or six years.

She is now approaching the presumed age that Stumpy had attained when we no longer had the pleasure of his intermittent company on our ravine walks. Although there are other squirrels, grey and black, but never red, a far more edgily suspicious little breed, with whom we've become familiar and who similarly confront us for peanuts, not satisfied to visit the usual cache spots where they're left daily, it is the two little squirrels sans tails that managed to grab our affection.