Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary
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“Cards?”
She nodded her massive head. “The men who clean my pen like to play them on their breaks. Sometimes they sit on the bench beside the snack hut, and I watch.”
Off in the distance, the panther screamed. Then I heard a police siren. “If you wanted, I could maybe listen to what they’re saying,” I offered.
“I don’t know that I want to give them that much importance,” the hippo said.
“Fair enough,” I told her, and I tried to tamp down my disappointment. How can you not want to know what your parasites are talking about? I wondered.
“What if what they’re saying is cruel?” she continued. “It’s bad enough having them in there, but if they’re literally making fun of me behind my back, it would be too much to bear.”
“It’s equally possible they could be trying to thank you,” I said. “I mean, just because they’re leeches doesn’t mean they’re ungrateful.”
“Isn’t that sort of exactly what it means?” she asked.
I had just conceded her point when her curiosity got the better of her and she agreed to take me up on my offer. “If what they’re saying is awful, though, I don’t want to know the specifics.”
There was a short concrete platform near the front of her pen, and at her suggestion I stood upon it while she backed up. This brought her bottom level with my head, which I then cocked and brought as close as I could to her anus. “Raise your tail,” I said.
The hippo did, and I heard what sounded at first like a rabble, many voices talking over one another. Then I realized that they weren’t talking.
“Let me get this straight,” the hippo said when I explained what was going on. “Leeches are singing inside my asshole.”
“To the best of my knowledge, yes,” I told her.
“It’s so much fun in there that they’ve broken into song?”
“It could just be the way they communicate,” I offered. “Maybe this is what they do when they’re sad or angry.” It didn’t sound much like a dirge, though. More like a German drinking number.
“I want them out and I want them out now,” the hippo said, her voice so forceful the platform trembled.
“Look,” I told her, “there’s obviously nothing we can do right this minute, so let’s both sleep on it and see how things look tomorrow night.”
On my way home that evening, I swooped low over a suburban driveway and caught what turned out to be a gerbil. Funny-looking thing—slight, with a brushlike tail and a scrap of red fabric around her midsection. I had planned to grab a quick bite and go home to bed, but something this potentially interesting—it would be a shame to just kill it.
“Hold on, friend,” I said, and after her brief and pointless struggle, I learned that she was an escaped pet. An only child had kept her prisoner in her bedroom and was attempting to dress her in a doll-size bikini when the gerbil bit the girl on the hand and made a run for it. “For a few hours I hid beneath the refrigerator,” she told me. “That seemed too obvious, though, so I moved into a copper pipe in back of the hot water heater, the old disconnected one they keep in their mudroom, the slobs.”
It was so much new information: A mudroom! A bikini! A hot water heater! “How big was the pipe?” I asked.
The gerbil told me it was narrower than she was. “Not a problem for tunnel dwellers such as myself,” she said. “Truth be told, I like a tight fit.” She glared at the bikini top, then added, “Within reason.”
Just as I realized the gerbil’s potential value, I heard a beating of wings and turned to see my sister standing behind me. A moment later my brother landed. “What have we got here?” he asked.
“Looks like a mouse with a messed-up tail,” said my sister. “Or a little squirrel, maybe, that was rained on.”
“Actually, I’m a gerbil,” the gerbil said. I wasn’t expecting her to join the conversation, but hearing her voice—so full of pride and sass—made me feel right about sparing her. “If you’ve never come upon one of me before, it’s because I’m not native to this area. I’m”—and she said the greatest thing—“invasive.”
My brother moved a step closer to my sister and asked if that was another word for “dressed up.”
“I’m pretty sure. Yeah,” she answered.
The gerbil looked from one of them to the other. Then she turned to me. “Wow, these two are stupid,” she said. “No dumber than hamsters, I’ll grant them that, but you hear about owls and automatically think ‘brainy.’ ”
“That’s just a myth,” I told her, and then, before my dumbfounded brother and sister, I lifted the gerbil in my right talon and took off. Figuring my family would probably come looking for us, I flew past my home and headed to a henhouse on an abandoned farm out near the reform school. There I helped the gerbil remove her bikini top and watched as she hunkered down, exhausted, in a pile of hay. It would have been easy for her to run away, but I hoped she would stay put. More than hoped actually. I meant to say something to this effect, but then I must have dropped off.
It wasn’t much later that I awoke—the story of my life since my mate passed away. I get tired, wiped out, even, but can’t seem to sleep more than a few hours at a stretch. It’s such a weird time to be awake—noon. Spooky, really. There have been a few occasions when, tired of just standing there and hoping to fall back to sleep, I got up and flew around.
The dining options were definitely interesting—lapdogs, ducklings, I even saw an iguana sunning himself on top of a Styrofoam cooler. But there was also a lot of traffic and noise.
I never liked the world I saw during the day. Then I started hating the one I saw at night and wondered, What’s left? What changed things, albeit slowly, was learning. It’s like there’s a hole where my life used to be, and I’m filling it with information—about potatoes. About hot water heaters. Anything will do. These leeches, though. For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited. To live in a damp crowded asshole and sing—if these guys don’t know the secret to living, I don’t know who does.
The gerbil awoke just after sunset and busied herself hunting crickets. After that I took her to a bird feeder, where she put away a few dozen sunflower seeds. Then she wiped her mouth and turned to me, saying, “Okay, Owl, what’s the plan?”
A short while later we were at the zoo, where I introduced her to the hippopotamus. The two hit it off immediately, and within minutes the gerbil was all caught up vis-à-vis the anal parasites. “Fascinating!” she said. “And you’re telling me they sing?”
“I want them out,” repeated the hippo, and with no hesitation the gerbil offered to go in after them. “Why not?” she said. “I’ve been in tighter places—no offense—and if I can’t convince them to leave, I can at least find out what their story is.”
“You would do that for me?” the hippo asked.
The gerbil answered that she’d just spent eighteen months living in a cage. “When I finally escaped, I told myself that from here on out, I was going to make some changes: try new food, visit exotic places, live a little!”
I couldn’t believe what a good sport she was. I’d have wanted time to mentally prepare, but not her. The only suggestion she made was that we lube her up a little. “Just to give me a bit more mobility.”
“You think?” the hippo said. “But what about your fur?”
And the gerbil laughed, saying, “This old thing?”
There was a carousel near the entrance to the zoo. The gears were coated in heavy grease, and after the gerbil had rubbed against them, I returned her to the pen, where we positioned ourselves on the concrete platform. The hippo backed up under my direction, and though it took quite a bit of maneuvering, we eventually got her rectum even with the gerbil. She was just about to crawl in when I felt myself being watched, and looked up to see four pairs of eyes, perfectly round and glinting from a tree beside the snack hut. My mother was there, my brother and sister, and joining them was, I’m willing to gues
s, the cousin I’d stood up last night. Then an elderly uncle arrived. Then an aunt.
I used to think that there were great horned owls and not-so-great horned owls. I’d put my former mate and myself in the first category, and from that lofty vantage point, we’d looked down upon my family. Now they were looking down on me: A son. A brother. A cousin, a nephew, a half-baked know-it-all standing beside a grease-blackened gerbil at the gaping back door of a hippopotamus. Even discounting the singing leeches, it really was stunning: this trio of newfound friends, so far-fetched we simply had to be true.
About the Author
David Sedaris is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Public Radio International’s This American Life. His books have been translated into twenty-six languages.
About the Illustrator
Ian Falconer is the author and illustrator of the bestselling Olivia series: Olivia, a 2001 Caldecott Honor Book; Olivia Saves the Circus; Olivia… and the Missing Toy; Olivia Forms a Band; Olivia Helps with Christmas; and Olivia Goes to Venice (2010). His illustrations have also graced many covers of The New Yorker. In addition, he has designed sets and costumes for the New York City Ballet, the San Francisco Opera, and the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), among others. He lives in New York City.