August is fast wrapping up its business for 2022, courteously making way for September. It's been an unusually hot and wet month, more so than usual; certainly hard to predict. But it's given us everything that weather systems can muster. Today, hot and muggy like yesterday. Almost as hot, but no sun today, although there's a carry-over of yesterday's hot wind (dragon's breath). We've had a succession of dark clouds and finally the cloud cover was complete.

 

Earlier in the day, when we went off to do our grocery shopping the clouds were puffy-white, diaphanous and beautiful. But they moved quickly across the sky, Aeolus doing what gods of wind do best. Since the forecast was for rain and afternoon thunderstorms, we left the house early before cleaning up the kitchen post-breakfast. It was already raining, but just lightly, and we thought we'd do a short circuit at the very least.

 

It was so beautifully comfortable in the ravine with the wind hot as it was blowing away the feeling of thick humidity and Jackie and Jillie were so busy, in and off the forest trails, exploring more than usual, we thought we'd risk getting caught in a real downpour and continue on. 

 

There was that dusky atmosphere in the ravine with dark skies overhead and the closed-in feeling of the forest canopy that oddly enough makes colours more vibrant when you'd expect them to be dull. Although light rain fell, none of it reached us; the canopy absorbed it all. 

On one familiar part of a side trail I noticed a very small form squirreling its way up a tree and stopped briefly to try to identify it. It was tiny, and turned out to be a baby grey squirrel. We don't usually see really  young squirrels out and about. And there's been a paucity of squirrels resulting from the presence of the owls a few months back, now departed.

 

The little fellow changed its mind, altered direction and came down the tree trunk, and without any apparent hesitation quickly moved along the forest floor to where we were standing. We two and our two puppies. Jackie and Jillie were alert and interested. We were more interested in moving them away from the tiny creature, but they persisted. Jillie sniffing, Jackie minimally suspiciously hostile.

 

 

If either moved too close to the baby squirrel, it defended itself by charging at them. Small as they are for dogs, they loomed over the tiny thing like giants. But it wasn't our pups the squirrel was interested in, it was us. More precisely, Irving. The squirrel mounted Irving's boot and made to clamber up his leg. Irving picked it up and it snuggled against his chest; the idea was he meant to mount it on a tree branch. That done, he turned away and the squirrel ran back down and followed him.

 

 

We were both attracted to the beautiful little creature and fearful for its safety. Squirrels are wild animals with (usually) a well-developed suspicion of humans and a strong sense of self-preservation around dogs. This little guy defied all those survival conventions, he just kept running after us. We thought if we ignored it, it would lose interest, but no such thing. We had to keep ordering our pups to leave the squirrel alone.

Finally, Irving picked it up again and told me to move on quickly with Jackie and Jillie, as he entered an animal side-trail making his way through to a few yards' depth and once again placed the baby squirrel on a high branch of a thick trunk, and speedily departed. Looking back, he saw the squirrel descending again, preparing to continue following him, so he picked up speed.

 

It's not the happiest of thoughts, that a vulnerable young animal has somehow missed its master lessons on self-preservation. Taking him with us, out of the question; removing a wild animal from its most familiar surroundings is disorienting and potentially harmful. And how could we instill in the tiny creature the kind of caution that its DNA required of it and its mother would have demonstrated?

An unsought dilemma. The little squirrel's pelt was beautiful, it was in obviously good physical health, so that if he was indeed on his own he knew how to forage for food, and how to live in his natural environment. Why he would become fixated on humans is a biological mystery. In a sense, heart-breaking.