Squirrels in the Attic

by LEONARD DUBKIN

1

THERE was a time when I was out of work. Ever since I was fourteen years old I had been working at one job or another, usually on some newspaper as a reporter. But I don’t think I was a good newspaperman, for I was not properly impressed with the importance of my profession in the total scheme of life, as every good newspaperman should be. The desire to scoop the other afternoon papers on an important story, a desire which burned fiercely in the minds of everyone on my paper, from copy boy to publisher, seemed to me an achievement of dubious value, as unimportant in the life of our community as some chessplayer’s desire to capture his opponent’s queen.

The managing editor of my paper probably knew how I felt about my work, for I had often made cynical remarks about some of the stories we had printed; and once I couldn’t help grinning disparagingly while he was lecturing me on my duties as a servant of the people. But he put up with me, perhaps in the expectation that I should some day have an assignment so vitally important that it would open my eyes to my true role as a public servant. He put up with me, that is, until I was sent out on what I shall call the Racine case, and then the elasticity of his tolerance reached its limit, and I was fired.

Everyone in Chicago was talking about the Racine case. A woman’s body had been found stuffed into a culvert in the suburb of Oak Park, and the next day it was identified by a Mr. Charles Racine as the body of his wife. The husband was as mystified as to the motive for the horrible crime as were the police, but our hard-boiled city editor had a hunch that Mr. Racine knew more about the crime than he was admitting. So he sent me out to Oak Park to have a talk with the man and see what I could find out.

Mr. Racine lived in a large house on the street which divided Chicago from Oak Park, and he was alone in the house when I called. He was a tall, thin man in his early sixties, with a deeply lined face that was always ready to break into a smile. He didn’t look like the sort of man who would murder his wife and stuff her body into a culvert.

We sat in the living room talking, and I asked him the usual questions. Soon I became aware of little scratching noises in the walls, with occasional muffled squealings. Once there was the sound of little feet scrambling from one end of a wall to the other, as though one rat were chasing another through the wall, and then a squealing sound as though they were fighting.

I nodded my head toward the sounds and said, “Rats in the wall, aren’t there?”

“No,” he said, a kindly smile lighting up his face, “those are squirrels.”

“Squirrels? But how do squirrels get in the walls?”

He led me to a window and showed me a large cottonwood tree that grew beside the house, its branches brushing the roof. “If I knew exactly where they were getting in,” he said, “I’d block up the hole; but this is an old house and they could probably get in at half a dozen different places. The landlord gave me a big squirrel trap that I bait with a nut and keep up in the attic, and every once in a while I catch one. He told me when I caught one to drop the trap in a bathtub full of water and drown it, but when I caught the first one I didn’t have the heart to do it. He was a cute thing, sat up on his hind legs in the trap and chattered at me like a baby. So now when I catch one I take a streetcar to the end of the line and let it loose.”

“Well,” I said, “I never heard of squirrels living in the walls of a house before. I always thought they preferred a hole in a tree.”

“Maybe some do, but not these squirrels. You should see what they do up in my attic! Pull whole newspapers down in their hole, and clothes, and anything else they can drag along the floor. Come on up and I’ll show you.”

I followed him up a winding stairway to the attic, a long, low-ceilinged room lighted by one small window. “Sometimes, ‘ he said, “I sit here quietly on the floor, and after a while they come up out of that hole in the floor and I can watch them; they don’t pay any more attention to me than if I was a piece of furniture. Would you like to watch them for a while?”

I said I should, and he pointed to a place against the wall. “Stay there for a while and they’ll come out. Stay as long as you like, because I’m going out and I’ll leave the front door open for you.”

2

So I sat there quietly in the dim light waiting for the squirrels to come out, and while I sat I thought of how strange it was to find squirrels which had become household pests, and I went over in my mind the fascinating subject of parasitism. Here was one species of animal, the gray squirrel, and he was considered by human beings in many different ways, according to the methods of survival he adopted. Out in the country the squirrels were shy, wild little woodland creatures, scampering up a tree trunk and chattering excitedly when some human walked by. In the city parks they were only half wild, and would take peanuts from the fingers of a child and even climb up a man’s clothes to see if he had any nuts in his pocket. But when they invaded a man’s house, when, probably because of the scarcity of other nesting sites, they chose to live between the walls of a human dwelling, they became parasites, and were to be caught and drowned like their relatives the rats.

As long as the animal remains aloof, as long as he confines himself to a plane of existence remote from my own, I will view him tolerantly, I will even try to entice him into a closer relationship by leaving nuts about in front of my house. But if he invades the walls of my home, if he disturbs my sleep and chews up my furniture, I will treat him as an enemy of mankind.

So mankind serves notice to nature, to all the creatures large and small that share this planet with us. Be beautiful, be interesting, be wild, mankind says to them; but keep your distance, do not, even unwittingly, interfere with our lives or our plans or our comings and goings. For if you do we will exterminate you, we wall eliminate you completely from the earth. And we have, or will soon have, the means to do it. We have become past masters in the art of destructiveness. There will come a time when only those creatures which are beneficial to us will be allowed to exist, and then only in the forms in which we choose to have them. If there are any squirrels they will be wild and shy, chattering at us from the top branches of some tree in the forest. And the pigeons and the rabbits and the ants will be those which do not fraternize with man — unless, of course, we like the taste of their meat.

A tiny head poked itself up out of the hole in the floor Mr. Racine had pointed out to me, and I watched it as it turned about so the eyes could view every part of the attic. It was exactly like the head of a large rat. It is a rat, I thought; for aren’t squirrels rodents, aren’t they merely rats that have become adapted to living in trees? But when the little animal came up out of the hole and stood for a minute on its haunches, its appearance of kinship with the rats vanished. Its bushy, feathery tail, twitching spasmodically like the tail on a mechanical toy, was reminiscent of the outdoors, of tall trees and wildflowers and the ground littered with brown leaves; and when it set out across the floor in long, hurried leaps it looked as much out of place in this dim attic room as some exotic bird.

It jumped behind some trunks that stood upright at one side of the attic, and for a time I did not see it. When it reappeared it was dragging a green sweater across the floor by one of the arms. It was quite a load for the little animal, and he would give it a few tugs, then leap off somewhere, to reappear a few seconds later and tug at the sweater again. Another squirrel came up out of the hole and ran toward the sweater, and it seemed to me he wanted to help; but the first squirrel chased him around the attic a few times and then down into the hole, and when he was alone again went back to the sweater.

It took more than an hour to get the sweater across the attic floor to the hole, and at least that long to pull the one sleeve down. But, though the body of the sweater moved as the squirrel tugged on the sleeve, the rest of it would not go into the hole. Finally he pushed his way up through the tangles of the sweater and with his two front paws forced it into the hole. Then he went down after it, and I did not see him again.

When I returned to the office the city editor was furious. Where the hell had I been? he wanted to know. When I told him I had been interviewing Mr. Racine, he told me to go tell it to the managing editor. The managing editor looked at me icily and told me to get my check from the cashier, I was fired. I found out later that Mr. Racine, after leaving me sitting in the attic, had gone back to the culvert where his wife’s body had been found to look for a pair of glasses he had lost there. He was picked up there and taken to the detective bureau, where he readily admitted that he was the murderer.

I found it hard to reconcile the kindly old man who couldn’t bear to drown a trapped squirrel with a cold-blooded murderer; but there it was in black and white, his confession was spread all over the front pages of every afternoon paper but ours.

At any rate, that was how I lost my job.

3

AT FIRST I was sure I would not be out of work long. I had many friends in the city, men and women in responsible positions, and I went around to see them as often as I thought expedient. We would sit around talking of this and that, or perhaps have lunch together, and when I left, my friend would usually assure me that he would remember me when something opened up. But as the weeks went by and nothing “opened up,” I noticed that my friends were beginning to avoid me, they were quite often busy when I called, or they had a luncheon appointment and couldn’t see me.

So, though I remained in the city, though I talked to people in a normal manner and walked about among the crowds downtown, I drew myself away from the society of other human beings. I began to spend a great deal of my time in that world which, unnoticed by the throngs of men and women intent on hurrying to their work or their homes, to the movies or to a night club, exists all about them, under their feet and over their heads and on every side. I became absorbed in the world of nature, the nature that exists in a big city.

I do not mean to imply that this was a new world for me, that I discovered it in the city at that time. Ever since I was a boy I have been interested in nature, and as far back as I can remember I have been watching the birds and insects and little animals that inhabit the city and the fields and woods on its outskirts. When I was around twelve years old I was determined to be a naturalist when I grew up, and I had a collection of insects, birds’ eggs, stones, fossils, and all the other objects that prospective naturalists collect. I also read all the natural history books I could get at the public library, and I filled dozens of notebooks with the minutiae of my collecting expeditions. But the exigencies of earning a living, the necessity of contributing money at home, soon dampened any hope I had of being a naturalist. And though my interest remained as strong as ever, though I continued to be curious about the processes and methods of nature, I no longer had the time to observe them as closely as I might have wished. Ever since I had my first job, at the age of fourteen, my nature-watching had become a furtive, secret part of my life, to be indulged in at odd moments when no one who knew me was around, like some awful vice.

But now that I no longer had a job, now that I could do what I pleased with my time, I began to watch the birds and insects and animals in the city openly, without any thought for who might be around or what he might think of me. I discovered many curious and interesting things I had never known before, and rediscovered others I had known as a boy.

A wealth of life exists just above the surface of the earth, between the blades of grass, under fallen leaves and twigs and stones, on and under the bark of trees, and on the leaves and stem and flowers of every plant. There, creatures that vary in size from a tiny fraction of an inch to three and four inches live out their lives, unseen by human eyes, unaware of the vast changes that man has wrought on the face of this earth: little beings as weird in appearance as though they had been dreamed in a nightmare, as fantastically made as though their organs had been thrown together haphazardly, with habits as varied and as strange as though they had been conceived by a madman, and yet each one singularly fitted for a particular role in life, for a particular duty on earth, for an honored place in the scheme of existence.

Just to study the ants alone, to observe the habits of the different kinds of ants and try to solve the enigmas of their actions and behavior, would take many lifetimes. There are ants that spend their entire lives capturing slaves to do their work for them; others keep herds of plant lice, or aphids, which they milk. One variety of ant does nothing but plant and cultivate huge underground gardens of the mushrooms on which they feed; others march through the grass in long lines, with bits of leaves they are bringing home held over their heads like umbrellas. There are individual ants of one species which attach themselves to the ceiling of the burrow and hang there for months, fed by the others until they are round little barrels that act as food reservoirs. There are ants that have a highly developed sense of social consciousness, others that are predaceous. Some live in trees, others in the ground. Some species are carnivorous, others eat only a particular kind of fungus.

And yet ants are only one kind of insect in the vast multitude that inhabit the earth. There are also the beetles; those that roll carrion into huge balls, those that drag dead birds or mice underground, embalm them, and raise their young on the flesh, those that fly and others that are earthbound. There are also many different kinds of bees, and wasps, and flies, and butterflies and moths, and dragonflies and mosquitoes and midges, and spiders, and grasshoppers and leafhoppers and crickets and ticks — and a thousand others. And then there are a host of insects so insignificant to man that they do not even have common names, but, if they are ever referred to at all, are called simply “bugs” — except by entomologists, who have long Latin names for them.

During the period of my unemployment the world of insects was for me a refuge from the human world in which I felt myself an outcast. Whenever I felt depressed and melancholy, when, after answering help-wanted ads in the newspapers and going from building to building “ seeing” my friends, it seemed to me that there was no place for me in the society of my kind, that I was a useless individual in a busy world, I would walk to one of the little parks near the Loop, or to a grassy place beside the river, and spend an hour or two watching the insects. And watching the insects had the effect of completely obliterating the world of human beings from my mind; it was like a drug that deadened my memory, and left no aftereffect, no hang-over.

At first, when I sat down in the grass, with the noises of the city all about me, the rattle and clang of streetcars, the blowing of auto horns, the chugging of a locomotive somewhere in the distance, and the shrill blowing of a policeman’s whistle, there would be no sign of activity on the ground, nothing moving in the grass. I had chosen a barren spot, I would think, there were no insects here at all. But as I continued to stare at the ground and my eyes became focused to the small, I would become aware of a movement in the grass, perhaps an ant, or a hairy brown caterpillar, or a little fly with golden body.

Once the first thing I saw was a spotted ladybug moving sedately up a blade of grass. When she came to the top she went over and continued down the other side, then on to the next blade of grass. I got down on one elbow and watched her go from stem to stem, up one side and down the other, until she came to a spot of black on a grass stem, where she stopped. I moved my head directly behind her for a closer look and saw that the black spot was made up of tiny aphids, each with its threadlike beak stuck into the stem sucking the juice. The ladybug was methodically gobbling up the aphids, one to a mouthful, until there were none left. Then she continued up and down the grass stems until she came to another colony of aphids, where she duplicated the procedure.

4

ANOTHER time, on a leaf of a small bush, I saw a queerly shaped green bug that looked like a tiny triangle with two bulging eyes on top. I had often seen these bugs when I was a boy, and had marveled at their strange appearance. Why were they shaped like triangles, I wondered, and what purpose did they serve in the insect world?

I used to watch these bugs closely every time I saw one, and the only thing I ever saw them do was walk about on leaves, then lift their heavy wing covers, like a little old lady lifting her skirts to cross a street, and fly off. I had heard them called stinkbugs, because when they were disturbed they shot off a little vapor of evil-smelling stuff; but the descriptions of them in the books on entomology I had read did not mention a common name, and the scientific name was so long and meaningless that I never could remember it.

Another thing that puzzled me about this bug was the location of its thorax. I could not afford a cyanide jar in which to kill the insects I wanted for my collection, but I had read somewhere that a practical and inexpensive method of killing insects was to pinch the thorax firmly. This method served me very well, and the slight disfigurement of my insect specimens was hardly noticeable when they were mounted. But where was the thorax of this triangular bug? It was built somewhat like an armored tank, and its thorax was hidden somewhere within the armor. Each time I tried to kill one I would invariably pinch the wrong part of its anatomy, and the body fluids would come oozing out, leaving a shapeless mass unfit for mounting. So I never had a stinkbug in my collection.

But to return to my story — I once saw one of these bugs on a leaf of a small bush that grew in an empty lot east of Michigan Boulevard, where I had gone to recuperate from a day of looking for work. I put my head down close to the leaf and stared at the bug, marveling at its odd shape. I was not interested in the location of its thorax now, for there would be no purpose in killing it — I no longer had a collection. The little bug walked to the edge of the leaf, then turned and went under it. I turned the leaf over by the stem so I could watch the bug, and saw, peacefully grazing on the underside of the leaf, which was uppermost now, a green caterpillar with two rows of yellow dots along its back. The triangular bug approached the caterpillar, and as it came close there issued from its head, under the armor, a long, jointed, pipelike affair with a point at the end. Then the bug rushed fiercely at the caterpillar, and I thought of an armored knight with a crooked lance attacking a huge dragon.

The end of the stink bug’s pipe penetrated the side of the caterpillar, and the bug quickly raised his pipe high in the air and held the squirming caterpillar impaled there. For a long time he stood motionless, holding that wriggling dragon that must have weighed five times as much as himself. What was he doing with it? I wondered. Was he some insect sadist watching the death throes of an impaled caterpillar? Or was he merely waiting for it to die so he could eat it?

After a time the caterpillar stopped squirming; it hung limp and lifeless from the bug’s pipe. Then the bug lowered its pipe, brushed the caterpillar off on the edge of the leaf, and walked away. I picked the caterpillar up from the ground where it had fallen and held it between my fingers. It was thin and hollow inside; the stinkbug had drained it of its juices. What a horrible way to die, I thought, to have one’s insides slowly drained out while hanging in the air. And yet it seemed horrible only to me, to the human observer. Delicacy of feeling does not exist in nature, and no creature but man has ever felt either pity or remorse. The stinkbug had been provided with only one method of getting its food, and this was it. To the caterpillar it was a natural death, neither better nor worse than any other. There was no question of cruelty involved here, for cruelty is a concept that has been evolved in the brain of man, and it had no existence for these little creatures, nor anywhere in nature.

5

LATE one afternoon I was walking on the east side of Michigan Boulevard, near the Art Institute, when I decided to sit down on the grass for a while and rest. It was a hot day, and the passersby were mopping their faces with damp handkerchiefs, the men with their coats off, collars open, and sleeves rolled up. I sat for a time watching the cars rush by, then stop in a row when the traffic light was red. What a silly, senseless life people lead in a big city, I thought. Here were these men and women driving cars madly down the Boulevard as fast as the law would allow them to go, zipping around cars that were moving too slowly, honking their horns wildly when it seemed as though they might have to slow down to let some pedestrian cross the street. Then they came to a traffic light that was red, and they calmly sat in their motionless cars staring out of the windshield, waiting for the light to change so they could go tearing ahead again.

As I sat there I heard, through the noise of the traffic and the talking of the passers-by, the thin, high, intermittent shrilling of a cricket somewhere under the grass. Now the singing of a cricket has always been a sort of challenge to me; it sets off in my mind, each time I hear it, some compulsion to track the little insect down and watch it producing its rasping sound. Hundreds of times, both as a boy and as a man, I have crept cautiously up to the spot from which the shrilling came, and dozens of times I have been close enough to see the cricket, but each time the insect has become aware of my presence and stopped singing, so that all I ever succeeded in seeing was a little black insect scurrying away under the grass. I have read, of course, that they produce the sound by rubbing their wing-covers together, but that is not the same as seeing the sound being produced: it is as though all one knew about human speech was the fact that it is produced by a vibration of the vocal chords.

I got up, looked about to be sure no one was watching me, then cautiously approached the place from which the sound was coming. Twice the cricket became frightened and stopped singing, and each time I stopped where I was and stood motionless until the singing started again. When I was directly above the sound I lowered myself carefully to the ground, looked about again, then lay down on my stomach with my head a few inches above the grass.

At first I could not see anything; there was only a dim blackness between the grass and the earth. The cool, dank, heavy smell of earth and growing grass filled my nostrils, and the piercing clamor of the cricket’s song so close to my ears obliterated the city sounds all around me; I might have been lying on my stomach in some country field miles from any house or town. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness under the grass I began to make out little objects, a twig and a few stones, an old curled-up brown leaf, and the grass stems going into the ground. A black ant came into view, rushed about busily first one way and then another, and finally disappeared under the curled-up leaf. But I could not see the cricket, though the scraping of his wing-covers filled my ears.

Then at last I saw him. He was standing on the end of a little twig that came out of the ground at an angle, his legs gripping the twig, his long, angular hind legs projecting out behind him like two braces. I could see him start his song by raising his wing-covers and vibrating them against each other for a few seconds, then slow the vibrations until the shrill rasping trailed off into little clicks of sound. After each burst of song he changed his position on the twig, loosening his grip and revolving a little to the right or left, like an opera singer shifting his stance for another aria.

Soon I became aware of a second cricket, smaller than the first, crawling up the twig toward the singer. It was, I decided, a female, for she crawled slowly up the twig with a sort of feminine meekness, as though she were attracted by the song but was not sure what sort of reception she would get from the singer. While he was singing she did not move, but crouched low on the twig as though she did not dare interrupt his singing; it was only during the short silent intervals that she moved toward him.

When she stood before him he stopped his scraping, lowered his head toward her, and felt her with his antennae. Then he raised his head and went on with his singing, while she stood meekly before him. Well, I thought, this is a fine situation. His beautiful singing has won him a mate, but he doesn’t want her, she doesn’t appeal to him. Perhaps he’s an aesthetic cricket, rubbing his wingcovers together just for the joy of hearing his own song. He probably believes in art for art’s sake, and is repulsed by the thought of using his song for material ends, like attracting a female.

But the lady knew her rights; when she saw that he was paying no attention to her she rushed at him fiercely, butting him so hard that he broke off his singing and rolled over on the twig, hanging under it by his legs. Then he turned so he was standing atop the twig again, and for a few seconds the two insects looked into each other’s eyes. What thoughts were going on behind those eyes, in those rudimentary little brains? The situation seemed similar to one in which two human beings might find themselves: it was a case of a girl who had thrown herself at the feet of a man she worshiped, and had been repulsed. And yet how could I know that these insects were thinking what a man and a woman would think in like circumstances? I could only guess at their reactions, I could only be certain that some sort of drama was being enacted here, on a tiny twig underneath the grass. It might be a drama like a million others that were taking place in and on the earth, beneath stones, under the bark of trees, on waving grass-stems, on leaves high in the air, and in the homes of people. But these little creatures standing on their twig looking into each other’s eyes could not know that.

When the two crickets had looked their fill the smaller one turned about and crouched down on the twig, the end of her glossy black body glistening in the other’s face. They must have reached some agreement, I thought, for now the male rose to the occasion, he scrambled quickly between her legs. It was then that I became aware of voices about me, and I realized with a start where I was.

“Why doesn’t somebody call an ambulance?” a woman’s voice was saying.

Then a man’s voice said, “ He’s probably just drunk. Come on, help me turn him over.”

I turned over and sat up in one swift motion, and, blinking my eyes in the sudden strong light, saw a crowd of people grouped around me in a circle. For a second no one moved; they all stared down at me as though I were a corpse that had suddenly come to life. Finally one man leaned down toward me and asked, “ You all right? ”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m all right.” Then I got up hurriedly, pushed my way through the gaping crowd, and walked as quickly as I could down Michigan Boulevard, acutely conscious of the eyes that were following me, my face burning with embarrassment.

(To be continued)