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It was a sunny Saturday afternoon when I stepped out the front door of my home for a run and discovered neighbors standing in a circle in the street, peering at the ground.
There lay a juvenile gray squirrel, dying. A trickle of blood ran down from the corner of its open mouth and pooled on the concrete. We deduced that it had fallen from a branch above.
Suddenly, someone gasped, “Look!” Running towards us was an adult gray squirrel. It hurried past our legs to the side of the youth, rolled the body into a ball, clutched it in its mouth and carried it to the bottom of the tree directly across the street from my house.
I took a seat on the front steps to see what would happen next.
Six feet off the ground in the trunk of the tree was a hollow. And for fifteen agonizing minutes the adult squirrel tried to haul the youth up the trunk to the hollow over and over. And over and over it dropped the body, racing after it when it hit the ground to ball it up again.
At the last the defeated adult stood over the lifeless form and, for forty-five minutes, shrieked and shrieked with a piercing cry. When it quieted, it stood silent for a few minutes more. Then balled the body again, heaved it up the great height and disappeared into the hollow.
Dramas of sentience and love are unfolding around us every day that call for our witness and compassion, preservation and respect.
May we be given eyes like God’s to see.
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