Day was drawing to a close as we approached the international bridge. We still had many miles to go before we reached our destination in northern Québec, but we’d already been on the road a long time and we were tired. So we bailed out at a state campsite just south of the border. After a hasty meal I took my tea to the base of a tall pine and leaned back. Swallows swooped low over a slow-moving river. I dozed. Then something hit the top of my head and bounced off. I looked down. I’d been thumped by a pine cone. I rubbed my scalp. Oh, well, I thought, just a once-in-a-lifetime thing. No problem. And I closed my eyes again. But not for long. Only a minute later, a second cone hit me. I looked up into the crown of the pine. No breeze stirred the branches. I rubbed my head again, as much in puzzlement as pain. Then I moved a few feet away from the towering pine’s massive trunk and stretched out. Soon I was nodding off. My nap was a short one, however. A third cone hit me right in the solar plexus.

I eyeballed the topmost branches of the pine once more, and this time I struck pay dirt. A diminutive red squirrel stared down at me from a perch at the end of a long limb. It was obvious that I’d been trespassing on his turf. OK. I figured it was time for me to move on, anyway. So I did, walking a few yards and settling down under a neighboring pine. I was in the process of lifting my mug to my mouth when a fourth pine cone landed right in my tea. I mopped my face with my bandanna before looking up. Sure enough, a now-familiar figure was clinging to a branch in the top of the second pine. And just to make certain I’d gotten his message, he gave vent to a lusty churrrrr.

Retreat was the only option. I decamped to my tent. But that didn’t bring a halt to the harassing fire. Cones rained down on the tent fly at irregular intervals until long after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

Message received. And understood.

 
This happened almost thirty years ago, on the eve of my first Big Trip. I’d seen red squirrels before, of course, but I’d never paid much attention to them. My mind was mostly on the birds, I suppose, and if I thought about the members of the “red guard” at all, it was as smaller and more frenetic imitators of their gray cousins, those phlegmatic habitués of city park and rural garden. Now, however, I was headed Up North, deep into the heartland of the realm of the red squirrel. Read more…

 

 
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