My wife and I thought we were empty nesters. Our four children had grown and scattered, and we’d gradually adjusted to the quiet and extra space in the house. Last winter, however, while we were away from home on a pleasure trip, our housesitter cheerfully informed us: “There are critters in your attic. It sounds like they’re playing poker up there.”
If not poker, they were playing house and other verminous games in our unfinished attic. The battens of fiberglass insulation, which I’d neatly laid between the joists, looked like an unmade bed, and there were pockets of splintered wood, rags and other nesting debris.
Having experienced a previous squirrel invasion, I knew how destructive these voracious predators could be, and not simply to the interior recesses of a house. Listening to squirrels as they gnaw, claw, scrape and squeal in his deepest, darkest inner sanctums can leave a homeowner helpless with frustration and rage.
Checking the outer perimeter of the house, I spotted a hole on one edge, nearly hidden by a downspout, too high for me to seal and repair. I launched a weak counteroffensive, placing pans of industrial-strength ammonia around the attic, on the advice of my helpful hardware man. The fumes were so strong I had to immediately evacuate the attic, but the ammonia seemed to have no effect on the squirrels, except perhaps as an aphrodisiac, to judge by their wicked moans and screeches.
In a few months, it didn’t matter. The weather turned warm, and the squirrels moved out of the house without any coaxing. Watching them forage around our yard during the summer, I could only hope that it was a permanent move, and that by the time fall arrived they would have built their nests in the trees and forgotten about our house.
My hopes were dashed with the first hard rain in September. Not only did the squirrels restake their claim to our house, it was obvious from the heavy traffic that the tribe had increased exponentially. With all their hustle and bustle, amplified by the hollow passages between the floors and walls that served as their freeways, there were moments I feared they were going to break through the lathe and plaster and drive us out of the house, if not out of our minds.
Worse perhaps, the sound of these intruders set off ghostly echoes of the first visitation, more than 30 years earlier. That was when we’d moved into the house, a turn-of-the-century Queen Anne that needed extensive renovation. As soon as we settled in and began rehabbing, it became apparent that not all the previous tenants had vacated the premises. With Halloween approaching, our children were badly spooked, and they were not comforted when we told them it was squirrels they heard in their bedroom walls and ceilings, not ghosts.
It was clear that peaceful co-existence was out of the question. The widely advertised ultrasonic rodent repellers sounded promising, but we had no electrical outlets in the attic, barely a crawl space. A hardware clerk suggested we scatter-bomb their lairs with mothballs, a tactic that not only failed to dislodge them but left the house reeking of naptha. On the upside, we weren’t bothered by moths.
Meanwhile, I was patching the holes in the eaves with sheet metal, the better to deflect the squirrels’ chainsaw teeth. No sooner had I closed a hole, however, than the squirrels would chew another in the soft wood beside the metal patch. And in my haste to keep the squirrels out of the house, I sealed several of them inside–blocking their exits as well as their entrances and forcing them to bore new escape routes.
With all the pockmarks and perforations, the house started to resemble a Dillinger hideout after G-men had opened up with their heaviest artillery. A neighbor who’d weathered a similar offensive recommended the commercial traps available at most hardware stores. They did the job, but a little more effectively than I’d expected. Using peanut-buttered bread as bait, I detained 11 squirrels over a warm weekend and took them to a distant wilderness, putting a sanitary canal, an interstate, and numerous other lethal obstacles between us, to be sure they couldn’t find their way home–not to my home, anyway.
For all the grief they caused, the squirrels did bring unexpected compensations. At parties and community gatherings, the conversation often turned to the destructive habits of urban wildlife– rats, skunks, possums, raccoons, chipmunks, as well as squirrels. One friend told of trapping squirrels and drowning them in a water barrel. Another asphyxiated his caged squirrels by leaving them in his closed garage with the car engine running.
The more I thought about it, the more apparent it became that squirrels and other domestic insurgents could push otherwise reasonable people well beyond the edge of obsession into temporary insanity. I imagined a fictional rehabber as the narrator of a short story that I later expanded into a novel, “Small Game,” published in 1992. In a discordant, disconnected voice, he recounts his increasingly Draconian, seriocomic efforts to rout his enemies, real and imagined, human and inhuman, and turn his home into a fortress.
Like most contemporary novels, the book quickly landed on the out-of-print list, but not before I became infamous in local precincts as the author of an “autobiographical” book about squirrels–or, more accurately, a book about killing squirrels and other indiscreet activities. Some readers assumed that I’d spilled the beans not just about my murderous crusade against defenseless animals but my malfunctioning personal life. I learned to live with that erroneous rap, as well as with all the squirrel effigies–stuffed, cast, carved, printed, embroidered–that people gave me.
What mattered most, though, was that I had defeated the squirrels decisively and, I was convinced, permanently. After releasing the captured squirrels, I stored my traps in the backyard tool shed and congratulated myself on a mission accomplished. As the years passed and my sense of invulnerability increased, we had the house re-sided (with historically correct cedar rather than squirrel-resistant aluminum or vinyl), repainted and reroofed, covering the unsightly holes and other blemishes. Meanwhile, another generation of squirrels regrouped in our yard, but they ignored our house and built their nests in the ash, box elder and maple trees. I was convinced we’d achieved a lasting rapprochement.
When the squirrels came back in force last fall, I tried to be calm and philosophical about it, rather than act impetuously or unreasonably, assuring myself that with patience and cunning I could easily uproot them. After my lame initial response with pans of ammonia, I briefly considered a counterstrike with light weapons. A neighbor offered to loan me his pellet rifle, even volunteered to serve as my hit man in case I had a shaky trigger finger or a soft heart.
But eventually I fell back on the one method I knew would work. I retrieved the traps from the shed, loaded them with peanut butter canapes, deployed them around the yard, and waited for the squirrels to take the bait.
For the next week, I found it difficult to focus on work, play or much else. I’d compulsively check the traps every 15 minutes or so. When the squirrels were at their most active, I’d sit on the back porch and watch them for an hour. It got to be a tense spectacle, however, like a close baseball game, as the squirrels, instinctively sensing deception and danger, made tentative, flanking moves at the traps. Go for it, I mumbled. And without fail, they did. I watched one squirrel drag the trap in a circle, in an effort to shake the bait loose, without entering the cage. Finally, he went for it too.
I accidentally let several squirrels escape, because I’d carelessly set a trap or failed to anchor it properly. In which case, I’d simply reset the trap, weight it with bricks, and, a few minutes later, the same squirrel would be caught again, this time with no possibility of early release. Or, I’d trap a squirrel, then place an empty trap next to it. Before long, another squirrel would show up, and despite the ominous sight and sound of his trapped playmate, he’d take the bait too.
Despite their ratty fur, their vicious teeth, their putrid smell, they seemed so pathetic that I felt a pang of regret, hauling them off in the car. I knew I was breaking up families, separating children from their parents and siblings, but I had to get them out of my house, out of my yard, out of my trees, out of my life, before they settled in for the winter and caused more havoc and permanently weakened the structure of the house. Besides, I assured myself, I’m liberating them from the murky, oppressive conditions in my attic. They’ll be happier after I release them in the wild–once the whole family is together again, it’ll be like squirrel heaven.
At the outset, I figured maybe I’d net four or five squirrels, at most, but after deporting more than a dozen, I lost count. I was also losing patience, weary of the lengthy relocation process, the tedious round trips, sometimes three a day, across the canal, the interstate, and into the woods. I thought I might save time and fuel by releasing them at a closer location, and so I called the animal shelter to ask about the minimum drop-off distance.
“Three to four miles,” said the woman who answered, “but it’s illegal to do that.”
“Illegal to trap squirrels?” I said. “Then why does the hardware store sell the traps?”
“You can trap them,” she said, “but you have to release them in your yard.”
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
I hung up and promptly forgot I’d had that conversation. When we stopped hearing noises in the attic and the yard seemed to be free of squirrels, I called a local roofing company to repair the damage. The carpenter spent half a day patching and painting, smoking a cigar while perilously balanced on an extension ladder. The job ended up costing me $400, but it was money well spent, I thought, since it was bringing both physical and emotional closure.
“That ought to take care of them,” I said, as the carpenter packed up to leave. He looked at me as if I were dumber than the squirrels. Then he smiled, relit his cigar stub with a propylene torch, and said: “If I were you I’d get a Daisy [air] rifle. They’ll be back.”
The awful, inevitable truth of that blunt prediction struck me like a hammer blow. But as I thought about it, the shock was eased by a morbid consolation: If the squirrels follow the same schedule as before, waiting 30 years between visits, I won’t be here when they do come back.
