Squirrel in the House

  SQUIRREL IN THE HOUSE

  by Vivian Vande Velde

  illustrated by

  Steve Björkman

  Holiday House / New York

  Text copyright © 2016 by Vivian Vande Velde

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Steve Björkman

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3744-3 (ebook)w

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3745-0 (ebook)r

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Vande Velde, Vivian, author. | Björkman, Steve, illustrator.

  Title: Squirrel in the house / by Vivian Vande Velde ; illustrated by Steve Björkman.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2016] | Summary: “A Squirrel narrates this story of a family get-together turned upside down when he climbs down the chimney to join the festivities”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015035413 | ISBN 9780823436330 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Squirrels—Fiction. | Humorous stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.V3986 Sq 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035413

  Dedicated with appreciation to Steve Björkman, whose lively illustrations brought Twitch to life in 8 Class Pets—and who encouraged me to write another story about him

  Contents

  Twitch, the School-yard Squirrel

  Inside vs. Outside

  Outside

  Inside

  People Children

  Not a Good Idea

  Table Manners

  Hello, Dog?

  No Pets in Mother’s Room!

  To the Rescue

  Home Sweet Home

  Twitch, the School-yard Squirrel

  The dog who lives next door to the yard where I live tells me that people call dogs “man’s best friend.”

  Well, actually, the dog doesn’t so much tell me this as he yells it. Usually while he’s chasing me. Often the dog gets so angry when he sees me that he tries to catch me. I don’t know why he gets angry. I guess some dogs are just highly excitable that way. But when he runs after me, he can only go so far. Then his leash stops him.

  I try to point things out to the dog, purely for educational purposes. I live in the school yard, so I am a very well-educated squirrel. I say, “Man’s best friend, huh? You’re tied to a tree. You did notice that, didn’t you? My friends don’t tie me to trees.”

  Time and again the dog gets so angry about the life lesson I’ve tried to give that he forgets about his leash. He lunges, he runs out of leash, he bounces back.

  Very calmly, not to tease him but only to explain the way things are, I say to the dog, “I think it’s squirrels who are man’s best friend. That’s why the man who lives here ties you up—so you can’t bother me.”

  The dog is not very smart. He does not appreciate my trying to educate him. Sometimes the dog gets so angry he forgets words. He barks the bark that is just noise: “Bark! Bark! Bark!”

  I never forget words, and I never bark.

  Still, the man who is not the dog’s best friend is not very smart, either. He doesn’t realize that he doesn’t have to tie up the dog to keep him from catching me. I can always climb a tree to get out of the dog’s reach.

  From the tree, I can drop walnuts onto the dog’s head.

  Purely for educational purposes, of course.

  Inside vs. Outside

  Another way that squirrels have a better life than dogs do—besides the whole tied-to-a-tree-with-a-leash thing—is that dogs sometimes have to go Inside with the people. Squirrels never have to go Inside.

  Well, we get to go inside trees where there’s a hollow, but that’s only if we want to. And that’s not the same thing anyway.

  Inside for dogs means even more rules than dogs have when they’re outside. Inside means no running around as fast as you want to, no digging, only eat when the people decide you’re hungry and wait for the people to tell you that you need to poop or pee. I know all this because I sometimes hear the man who lives with the dog explaining the rules. Sometimes he explains them very loudly.

  There are no rules for squirrels. Except for the obvious: Don’t let the owls catch you.

  (Dogs don’t have to worry about owls. Dogs think that’s because most of them are so much bigger than owls. I think it’s more likely that dogs don’t taste good, and that’s why owls don’t eat them.)

  So we squirrels get to run around as much as we want to, which is good, because we usually want to. We can dig wherever we choose, which usually means where we bury our food to hide it for later. We can eat whenever we want, so long as we remember where we’ve buried our food. And, of course, we can poop and pee as we see fit. The sense of that goes without saying.

  The dog who lives next door to my yard (which is bigger than his yard, by the way—not bragging, just saying), the dog tries to convince me he has it better. “It’s about to rain, squirrel,” he says, sniffing at the sky. “Master will bring me inside, where it’s nice and dry, and you’ll be all wet.”

  “I like rain,” I tell the dog. “Rain washes me off. You have to have the man wash you off with a hose and that stuff that bubbles and that he says smells like Tropical Sunset for Dogs with Sensitive Skin. I don’t know what tropical sunsets are, but I suspect only tropical sunsets are supposed to smell like tropical sunsets.”

  Sometimes the dog will say, “I smell snow coming. Do you like to wash in the snow, squirrel?”

  That just goes to show how not-smart the dog is. “You can’t wash in snow,” I tell him. “Unless it’s melted snow. And melted snow is water, not snow. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”

  “But snow is cold,” the dog tells me. “Too bad for you that you have to be outside in the cold.”

  “That’s why my blanket comes attached,” I say, waving my tail in front of his face. But only when he can’t get any closer because of the leash. When snow comes, I wrap my tail around me in my cozy nest in the tree hollow. I’m as warm as I need to be.

  But I am curious. I can hear some of what goes on Inside through the walls. And I can look Inside through the windows.

  But sometimes I wonder what Inside feels like.

  Outside

  One day the snow comes down very fast and for a long time. The wind blows from exactly the wrong direction: directly into the hole in my tree so that my cozy nest in the hollow is no longer cozy. The wind howls and whistles. The wind batters my cushion of dead leaves so that they crumble into bitty bits that make me sneeze. The wind ruffles the fur of my tail and wiggles its way into my bones.

  Because I’m cold, I cannot sleep. Because I cannot sleep, I grow hungry.

  The problem is: I’ve finished the last batch of summer nuts and berries that I dug up and brought back to my nest. If I want to eat, I have to dig up another of my food hiding places.

  The other problem is: I’m such a good hider, sometimes I have trouble finding my hiding places.

  And meanwhile the snow is still coming down.

  Which am I more? I ask myself: hungry or cold?

  I paw through the scraps of this and that in my nest—nutshells, bark, twigs—hoping to find a piece of something tasty that I might have overlooked.

  After I pick up what I suspect may be the same walnut shell I’ve examined three times already, I toss it outside.

  The wind blows it back in, and it bounces off my head.

  I look out from the hole in my tree.

  The snow covers all the branches of all the trees. On the ground, it has piled up higher than I am tall. Sometimes, when snow is crisp, I can walk on it.
Other times, when snow is fluffy, I sink down into it. Whichever kind of snow this is, my paws are going to get cold.

  Then I notice the house where the dog lives. I remember the dog saying, “Too bad for you that you have to be outside in the cold.”

  I realize the dog was inviting me in. That’s because everybody loves squirrels. Even the dog. He just sometimes gets excitable.

  I have to remember my manners. I will invite the dog to come visit me.

  Not that he can climb my tree. Or squeeze through the hole. Or fit in my nest.

  But it will still be polite to ask.

  After I’ve visited him.

  The house has three doors. Two of them are at ground level and are people-sized, but the third is obviously meant for squirrels. It is squirrel-sized, and it is on the roof with easy access via tree. The squirrel door is actually the finest of the three, as it has a grand brick entryway. This entryway goes straight down from the roof right into the heart of the house. Sometimes smoke and heat come out of this roofy doorway, but on this day the man who lives with the dog has not turned on the smoke and heat. As though the dog’s words weren’t enough, this is a clear signal that the man, also, wants me to come in.

  People LOVE squirrels. They put feeders out, just for us, high up off the ground so the dogs can’t reach them. Sometimes birds eat our food, but we squirrels know it’s been put out for us, not them, because of the playgrounds so many people build around our feeders, with rides for sliding and swinging and spinning on. The birds don’t use the rides; they only eat the food.

  And now both man and dog have invited me in. I can’t wait to see what wonders they have prepared for me Inside.

  Running fast so that my toes don’t get cold, I leap from branch to branch until I’m above the roof. I jump, but my toes must be colder than I thought, and I don’t go as far onto the roof as I expected, and the roof is icy, so I slip down toward the edge.

  My paws scrabble for something so I won’t fall off, and I catch hold of the metal squirrel ride thingy that most people have all around the edge of their roofs. On rainy days, these things fill with water for slipping and sliding around in, and at the corners of the house, they form slides down to the ground. It’s a lot of fun to go down these water slides. The people should build some for themselves. On this cold day the squirrel ride thingy is filled with snow, not water. Still, it’s good for catching hold of.

  With a squeal, the whole thing pulls away from the roof. The man really should have built it better: I could have gotten hurt! But all is fine. I’m able to scramble back onto the roof and up the outside of the brick entryway to the squirrel door. I sit on the edge and look down. I’m far up, but I can see Inside.

  Inside

  The brick entry hall that leads down from the squirrel door on the roof is very long. It is also very dark. Not to mention steep. Some of the bricks are slippery because of the soot and ash from when the man makes fire. But I’m very sure-footed.

  Until all that soot and ash makes me sneeze.

  Then I go down the last bit quite quickly. Not falling. But quickly.

  I land on pieces of a cut-apart tree at the bottom. Obviously this is the man’s attempt to re-create my tree that is Outside here Inside. It is his way of saying, “Welcome, Twitch.”

  For a few moments I can’t see because of the big black cloud of soot and ash that has come down with me. “Hello,” I call out to let everyone know I have arrived, even though I can tell, by listening and smelling, that neither the dog nor the man is in this room. That’s okay. I can make myself at home, which is what good hosts, if they were here, would tell me to do.

  Once the black cloud settles, I see that the floor beyond it is white and it looks fluffy, sort of like snow, but not cold. This is convenient for not getting lost because I’m leaving little black footprints wherever I set my paws down.

  From another part of Inside, I hear the dog. “Bark. Bark. Bark,” he says, too excited to form words. I hear the nails on his not-good-for-climbing doggy paws as he comes running on a hard surface toward the part of Inside where I am. I hear the man yelling, “Cuddles! Cuddles!” which is what he calls the dog. The dog calls himself Wolf-Born, the Swift and Ferocious. I call the dog the dog.

  The dog runs into the room where I am and immediately sees me. He looks so excited, I decide we need some distance between us.

  I jump off the fluffy white surface that isn’t snow, back on top of the pile of wood. “Hey, dog,” I say.

  He says, “You don’t belong inside. Out! Out! Out! Out! Out!”

  I say, “I just got here. Thanks for inviting me, by the way.”

  He repeats, “Out! Out! Out! Out! Out!”

  I scramble up the outside of the brick entryway that I used the inside of to come down from the roof. There’s a ledge here, where the man who lives with the dog has gathered things. Squirrels mostly gather nuts and berries and seeds. People gather all sorts of things that even people must know are not things to eat. I don’t recognize what the things are that the man has gathered except for some pinecones dusted with something that makes them sparkle and a container with water and flowers (even though there are no flowers Outside, on account of the snow).

  I’m so quick that the dog—I might have mentioned he’s not very bright—hasn’t seen where I’ve gone. So he starts looking for me by pawing through the pieces of tree where I landed when I first came in. The pieces of tree tumble out of their neat little pile and roll onto the white not-snow floor. The dog keeps barking, now asking, “Where are you? Where’d you go?”

  Which sounds to me like we’re playing hide-and-seek. So I step behind one of the I-don’t-know-what-it-is things on the ledge and say, “Here.”

  The dog looks up but can’t see me. He goes back to digging at the pile of wood.

  I step behind another I-don’t-know-what-it-is thing. I say, “Here.”

  The dog sniffs at the air. “Where?” he demands.

  I think he’s asking for too many hints, but I can see he really isn’t very good at this game. I go to step behind the flowers, to announce, “Here,” once more, but the container isn’t as steady as it should be, and the whole thing—container, flowers, and water—falls off the ledge and lands on the floor with a crash.

  The dog tries to leap up onto the ledge with me, but he’s not a good climber.

  I encourage him, saying, “Here! Here! Here!” as I dodge from behind thing to thing to thing on the ledge.

  “Not the lamp!” the dog shouts as a tall glass thing that is like the sun, but smaller, teeters.

  Okay, so I move.

  “Not the picture of Master’s mother!” the dog complains. Pictures look like the things they look like, except flat.

  I recognize Master’s mother as the woman who lives in this house with the man and the dog.

  Okay, so I move again.

  “Not Master’s first-prize trophy for being voted the best principal in the state!” the dog howls. He’s pacing back and forth on the floor below the ledge as though he’s trying to decide what to do.

  Then he decides.

  The dog jumps onto a chair and from there to the low table that has another sun-like lamp, and from there onto the ledge.

  “Good jump!” I cheer. It’s polite to acknowledge someone’s improved effort. I leap onto the cloth that is hanging over the window and climb to the branch-like metal thing on top. “Now I’m here!”

  Which is when the man who lives here with his mother comes running into the room.

  “Hello, man,” I call out, even though I know people aren’t as smart as animals and can’t understand us. “Thank you for inviting me.” But the dog is making too much noise for the man to hear me.

  In another moment, the man is making too much noise, too. “Cuddles!” he yells. “What are you doing? Come down immediately!”

  He grabs hold of the dog’s collar, but by this time the dog realizes how high up he is, and he freezes in fear.

  The man has
to put his arms around the dog and lift him down. While he’s doing this, the man’s elbow knocks into the lamp, and the lamp falls. Clearly the man has a love for leashes. Not only does he often tie the dog to the tree in the yard, but in here there’s a leash that fastens the lamp to the wall. So it’s the man’s own fault when this leash pulls taut and topples most of the pictures, including Mother’s.

  People run into the room. Apparently the man has invited quite a few guests in out of the cold. Which is fine. As guest of honor, I’m happy to meet them.

  The man’s mother starts yelling. “Sonny!” she demands. “Why are you trying to put that fool dog of yours up on my mantel?”

  “I’m not,” the man says, just as his foot comes down on the spilled water from the container of flowers. Still holding the dog, the man slides into the low table and knocks over that lamp, too.

  Inside is more exciting than I thought it would be.

  The mother starts yelling at the man; the man is yelling at the dog; the dog is barking his beside-himself no-words bark; and the other guests are all giving advice that sounds pretty useless to me.

  Things like:

  “Hold that dog.” (The man already is.)

  And, “Somebody should get a mop.” (Nobody does.)

  And, “That rug will never come clean.” (Maybe they could use Tropical Sunset for Dogs with Sensitive Skin to wash it.)

  Anyway, nobody notices me, sitting on top of the window.

  “Gramma! Gramma!” the two little boys in this crowd of adult people yell. “What’s Uncle Buzz doing?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” the mother says, shaking her head. To the man she says, “You put that fool dog Outside before he breaks any more of my things.”