Letting Go

Yesterday my 10-year-old daughter Jessica tried to call our black lab mix Jimoa into the house, but Jimoa and Matches, the Siamese cat, were arguing over something in the front yard. John came to use his “authoritarian” voice on Jimoa, but to no avail, so he went out to check what the two were fighting over.

“Jessica,” he called, “Please get some paper towels and bring them here. Matches has a mouse.” By then, Jimoa had stolen it from the cat, so he told Jimoa to leave it, which she did. She is a very obedient dog.

Jessica, being the not-always-so-obedient daughter she is, immediately ran out to see the mouse.

“That isn’t a mouse, Dad. It looks like a possum. Or maybe a squirrel.”

They inspected it more closely and with further urging from John regarding the paper towel, (“I told you to get a paper towel”), Jessica brought one. Intrigued by the only-slightly-more-than-normal chaos, I came to see what was going on.

We weren’t sure if it was an opossum or a squirrel, but it was obviously still alive, albeit injured. And it was newborn, or close to it – it’s little eyes still hadn’t opened yet.

The poor thing had a puncture wound in its chest, and a small tear to its lower abdomen, with what looked like a small loop of intestine slightly sticking out.

We had a choice. Put it to sleep right there (leaving the unpleasant decision of how uppermost in our minds) or try to save it. We opted for rescue and checked the Orange County Animal Services website to try to find referrals to wildlife agencies. We were in luck, and we discovered the phone number for the Piedmont Wildlife Center.

They verified that they would be willing to take the poor little thing, and off we went. I was concerned that the baby would get cold, and held it in my hand, with another hand covering it the entire 16 mile drive to the center. By the time we arrived, its breathing had quieted and it lay sleeping on my palm in a fetal position.

When we took the baby squirrel inside, it woke up and mewed a couple of times. The volunteer in the office brought a small box, layered with soft cloth and instructed that I place the animal in the box. This brought on a bit of heartache, because it turns out that during the drive over, the baby squirrel had bonded with me. It did not want me to put it down and clung fiercely to my index finger with its two front legs, crying very loudly in a high pitched voice over and over again.

I was finally able to extricate myself from the little thing, and went to wash the blood off of my palm. When I returned to the office, the volunteer worker gave us a paper with a case number on it, and told us we could call later to find out what was decided. We both agreed with each other on the way home that we were uncertain we wanted to know the disposition, preferring to believe that the baby had survived. (I wasn’t so sure this would be the case, however, because I had wet the corner of a cotton cloth with water and allowed it to suck on the cloth on the drive to Durham. When I removed the cloth from its mouth, there was blood on it – not a good sign, I thought, for an animal that didn’t apparently have any external facial injuries.)

About an hour after we got home, the phone rang. It was the Wildlife Center. They had called to let us know that they had had to put the baby to sleep. Although the intestines were fine, and the tear could have been repaired, the puncture wound to the chest was very deep and had perforated its lungs. The vet didn’t believe it could be repaired or healed, so they decided to put it down.

We thanked the center for updating us and for making an attempt to save the squirrel, and hung up. I still see the baby squirrel struggling desperately to hold onto my finger, crying not to be put down. I comfort myself by knowing that it would have died a much more painful death here at home, and at least it had pain killers and a quiet passing into eternal rest in the end.