It's been two years since we last saw the little tailless black squirrel whom we named Stumpy and who delighted us no end. For years we had a relationship with Stumpy that we thought of as quite special. He was very small, and probably seemed even smaller than he was because of the absence of a tail, other than a hairy little stump, a residual tail, all that was left of the tail he most certainly had been born with.

We know that sometimes, in the nest, very young squirrels occasionally get their tails caught in a knot making it difficult for them to separate. Just such knots of very young squirrels had occasionally ended up with the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre when they were still in operation. People coming across them somehow, bringing the little creatures in for the good folk at the Centre to figure out how to separate them.

In Stumpy's case he or some other squirrel might have, in desperation, bitten off his tail to grant him his freedom. He might have been attacked by another animal, leaving him intact and his tail gone forever. In any event, he was small, to us quite adorable. When he hopped away from us he resembled nothing so much as a rabbit. And when he hopped away from us it was generally because he was satisfied with the three-chambered peanut we had given him at any given time.

Any given time would have been an often daily occurrence, since it is daily that we take along peanuts to disperse in the ravine. After years of our acquaintanceship with Stumpy he suddenly one day disappeared, and we mourned his absence. In the two years prior to his disappearance another little squirrel sans tail had appeared. We assumed it was a female and we named her Stumpette. We would never see Stumpy and Stumpette in the same territory; we knew where he tended to hang out and where she did, and they were geographically separate, along our daily circuit in the ravine.

Now, for the past two years only Stumpette has remained. It's not as though she is the only squirrel who impudently accosts us, waiting, stump of tail twirling, for the expected response of a peanut to flash by at her. There are other squirrels with tail intact, grey and black who have, over the years become accustomed to our habit of leaving peanuts for them. They too approach us with expectations that we'll give them peanuts directly rather than ignore them and simply leave the offerings in the usual cache places which they are well familiar with.

Today, because we experienced our first-of-the-season full snowfall with a modest accumulation, the squirrels must have gone into a bit of panic mode. They were everywhere in the ravine, rushing about hither and yon to the usual cache places, with about twenty percent coming right over to us, and our store became exhausted, but thankfully, just as we prepared to exit the ravine, our circuit completed.