Collateral Damage

My rat poisoning campaign was an unqualified success.  They disappeared and, with two exceptions, went off to die where I couldn't find their bodies.  Unfortunately, they seem to have left the poison they stockpiled somewhere where other animals could find it.   So, today, I found out the hard way that it's difficult to poison just one type of animal.  Upon noticing Holli sniffing furiously near the deck I've been working on, I went over to see what she was into.  I lifted a couple loose boards to find two squirrels in the space below them.  One, an adult, was clearly dead.  The other, a baby, was clearly not.  He was huddled against the cold stiff body of the adult, and was looking up at me in the way that only baby animals can.  My stomach turned.  I had done this.

I reached into the space and the baby squirrel abandoned his vigil over his mother and tried to run away.  He was unsteady on his feet, and I knew he'd been poisoned too.  Still, there was a part of me that prayed he was okay.  Maybe, just maybe, he would get himself together and make it up the trunk of the palm tree he was desperately trying to scale.  Then maybe he'd be okay, or at least he'd be where I wouldn't have to see him anymore.  But, after watching him fall off two or three times, I knew he wasn't going to be okay.  There wasn't any way I was going to fix this.  I had done this.  I needed to end it.  So I did, choking back tears and apologizing the whole time.

Afterward, I called Sharon in Juneau.  When I told her about the baby, she asked, "Why couldn't we just adopt him?"

I used to be like that.  I used to bring home baby birds, gophers, stray dogs and cats.  I used to believe I could save all of them.  I know that little boy is still around inside me somewhere, because every time I think about how this afternoon, Hope lost an argument to Reason, I cry like a 4 year old.    

Comments

[Sharon]

I love you. You can't become a part of the nature in our yard without affecting it...but think of all the ways you have positively affected it too. We are part of the chain now and some will thrive and some will die. You didn't kill the squirrel anymore than you can can claim all the birds are alive because we put out seed and hang up a birdhouse. It's a living, dying, eating, crapping entity...and we are only one small part. I know it still sucks. Sorry.