The Squirrelpocalypse

                When I was fourteen, I made the mistake of watching The Exorcist right before going to sleep on Halloween night. I had thought that by this point in my life I would be mature enough to handle a cheesy 1970s horror film, but clearly I was not. I was, in no uncertain terms, scared shitless. As the October winds howled outside my window, I lay trembling in my bed, clutching a crucifix in one hand and my catalogue recreation of Sting from The Fellowship of the Ring in the other, as if a knockoff Elvish blade would do me any good against the unadulterated fury of Satan. And as I looked into the blackest corners of my room, where even the cheery glow of my nightlight couldn’t drive away the terrors of the dark, I kept expecting to hear a death rattle in my ear or to have oozing, rotted hands spring up from under my bed to drag me down to hell. 

                Suddenly, I heard the rafters creak overhead, and I let out a whimper that would have made a four-year-old girl ashamed. It’s just the wind. It’s just the wind. I rocked back and forth in a fetal ball, assuring myself in a high-pitched whisper that there was nothing to be afraid of, my fingers clenched tight around my dorky weapon. The creaking grew louder, and my whispering increased in pitch by an octave or two. Then there was a massive thud as something came crashing down in the attic, followed by the frantic scampering of clawed feet on the wooden floor. My stomach descended into my lower intestine, and in that very moment I learned that “scared shitless” was not necessarily an accurate idiom.

                Even as frightened as I was, I knew that I had to act quickly. If the spawn of the netherworld was indeed in my house, then I would need to head it off before it decided to backwards crabwalk down the attic stairs or projectile-vomit green slime all over the walls. I leapt out of bed with gusto, crucifix in hand, and ascended the pull-down staircase into the darkness of the attic.

                I regretted my decision immediately. Here I was in pitch-black darkness, dressed in nothing but my boxers, and potentially dealing with malevolent supernatural forces. Clearly I had not thought this one through. My bowels did a back flip when I heard the clatter of claws across the floor behind me. I whipped around and squinted into the darkness, holding the crucifix in front of me.

                “The power of Christ compels you!” I shouted in a high, cracked voice. If that possessed little girl from the movie showed up, I was prepared to bless that bitch into submission. I heard more clattering somewhere off to my right, this time followed by a strange squeaking sound. Then the scampering noises drew closer, and I felt something big and furry and wet crawl across my bare foot. I screamed like a little girl at the top of my lungs, dropped the crucifix, sprinted down the attic stairs and ran straight into my father. He was not amused.

                “Damn it, Will, why are you yelling like your dick’s in a blender at two in the morning?”

                “Demons! In the attic!”

                 After deriding me for being an idiot and then openly questioning my manhood, he explained that he had been hearing things upstairs, and he suspected that some sort of animal had gotten in the house. Curiosity got the best of me, and I followed him back up to the attic to see whatever it was that I had encountered.

                He turned on his flashlight and did a quick circuit of the attic before letting the beam fall on the far corner, where rested a large heap of a gray, lumpy substance.

                “Well,” he said, “judging by the size of that pile of shit, I’d say something has been up here for a while. Probably a rat or something.”

                He took a few steps toward the prodigious load of excrement, I suppose to further examine it for his own purposes, and about ten or fifteen furry lumps suddenly shot out from the darkness and scurried up and over the rafters toward the ceiling. There in the roof was a gaping hole, about the size of a football, through which the lumps scampered into the freedom of the night.  My father just stood there, mouth hanging open, looking at the massive hole that had been gnawed through his biggest investment.  And in that moment, I could see the seeds of hatred being planted. Thus began my father’s lifelong war against squirrels.

                I have heard various estimates of the size of the squirrel population in Charleston County, but all of the numbers fall somewhere between three or four million. That’s roughly ten squirrels per person. Not only are they everywhere, but they’re also horny little bastards, constantly churning out a new generation of baby squirrels, who will someday live to wreak havoc on every power line and the façade of every house in the tri-county area.

And for whatever reason, they love my back yard. Whether it’s the abundance of acorns or the copious amounts of birdseed left out by my mother, something about the Dantzler property lets the squirrels grow fat and reproduce to their hearts’ content. At nearly any given moment, I could look out of the window and count as many as ten of them basking in the sun, claiming my yard as their own. Every now and then they would look up at me, their cheeks comically swollen with acorns, my acorns, and I could imagine them saying in unbearably cute little falsetto voices, “Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?” Occasionally one of them would follow this question with something derogatory like “asshole” or “shithead,” and that would just put me over the top.

As my father and I discovered on that fateful Halloween night, the squirrels soon reached the point where they were no longer content with their conquest of the yard and decided to annex our attic. My dad, always the handyman, had patched the gigantic hole in the roof by the end of the week, but this did little to deter our rodent friends. By the end of December, they had gnawed their way back into the warmth of our home, where they littered the attic with their droppings and made constant noise during the night with their frenzied copulation and general goings-on.

My father made the motion to kill all of our attic invaders systematically with baited rattraps, but of course my mother and sister would have none of this idea. They pleaded with him, begged him, told him to have a heart. After all, the squirrels didn’t know any better. They were just trying to find a warm place to live for the winter, and they had just as much of a natural right to this property as we did. As repulsed as he was by the idea of animal rights, my dad humored them for a while. He bought a spring-loaded cage made of steel wire, which trapped the squirrels in solitary confinement after luring them in with a piece of cheese. From there, my dad merely had to carry the unwieldy 20-pound apparatus (complete with a live, very freaked-out squirrel) down two flights of stairs from the attic, where he could release the captive varmint into the wild to seek a life of happiness and self-fulfillment.

For various reasons, this method hardly proved to be effective. In fact, the have-a-heart trap almost seemed to egg the squirrels on. I think they began to lose respect for us as an opponent when they realized they could quite literally shit all over our property and we would do nothing to stop them. But by the time the third hole appeared in our roof, my father had had enough. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when one of them chewed through a wire in the wall and electrocuted itself. The squirrel managed not only to knock out the power to the television just as Clemson was staging a last-ditch drive in the fourth quarter of the Music City Bowl, but it bequeathed to us the parting gift of its rotting carcass, which remained lodged in a cavity in the wall and stunk up the house for a solid two weeks. Upon discovering the source of the power outage, my father let loose a long and very colorful string of swear words before vowing to reclaim our house by any means necessary.

The following week, I returned home from school one day to find my father standing over a long, thin package which lay on the kitchen table.

“What’s that?” I asked, noticing the slightly crazed sparkle in his eye.

He looked down at the package, and his mouth curved into a smirk.

“This, my son, is the Remington .177 caliber Air Master rifle, the most powerful pellet gun on the market.”

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

“You’re not planning on using that on the squirrels, are you?”

“I most certainly am.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Son, laws were written for the good of man. And what we have here is the ageless, primordial war between man and beast. If we give them the benefit of our so-called ‘laws,’ then we’re merely admitting defeat. Besides, it’s only illegal if we get caught.”                           

I had to admit, his logic was impeccable.

From then on, the war against the squirrels became somewhat of a passion of my father’s, if one can be considered passionate about killing small animals. Often times he could be seen leaning out of an upstairs window, rifle pressed close to his cheek, quietly and systematically sharpshooting squirrels off of a telephone wire or a tree limb like a skilled assassin at work. On his good days, he could pick off two or three from a group of five before the others even noticed that their comrades now lay inexplicably crumpled on the ground, twenty feet below them. On his rare bad days, he might only mortally wound his quarry, after which he would sprint out into the yard, weapon in hand, with the noble intention of shooting the vermin at point-blank range to end its suffering. It was on these days that visitors to our house were occasionally greeted with the sight of a grizzled, middle-aged man charging them with a rifle as they came up the driveway.

My sister took great pains to assure her friends that her father was not insane, even if he did run around brandishing a weapon and shouting about squirrels. Although she succeeded in convincing people that her family did not suffer from any form of acute bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, she still had a difficult time explaining why our dad did what he did. After all, there were few activities that were quite so singularly redneck as attempting to hunt squirrels in the back yard. At this point, we were merely a small step above the fellow in a stained tank-top in line at Wendy’s who bragged about the twelve-point buck that was now strapped to the hood of his F350, or the beer-guzzling behemoth at the gas station who bellowed into his mobile phone something along the lines of “Bo, Ah just caught the biggest Norwegian yellow-finned tunar.” Furthermore, we now had to live in constant fear of being discovered by the public. I kept expecting PETA to land a helicopter on our yard and douse our house with red paint, or the local paper to run a cover story on “Deranged Local Man Found Guilty on Multiple Animal Rights Charges.”

                But my father was not one to be discouraged by accusations of being a sociopath or a hick. He went right ahead with his merciless slaughter of the squirrels, sometimes to the point that I feared he was getting carried away. There were days when he would mow down as many as five or six in one sitting without feeling the slightest twinge of remorse for his adorable victims. I, in contrast, would imagine squirrel mothers gathering their twenty children, only to tell them between mournful sobs that daddy didn’t come home tonight. From there, I would picture the future generations of troubled squirrel youths, whose delinquency and angst were merely the result of growing up in a fatherless household.  

                It seemed to me that even squirrels, as tiny as their brains were, would be able to pick up on the fact that my yard was no longer safe for their kind. I thought maybe a brave veteran might crawl back to his home to decry the evil deeds of his murderers with his dying breath, or perhaps a smarter squirrel, possibly an academic or a renowned public servant, would notice that forty or fifty of his closest friends had not returned from their most recent foray into the Dantzler property. “Hey guys,” he would say to his cohorts, “I’m starting to think that going into that yard might be a bad idea. You know, seeing as nobody ever comes back. Ever.” But no such luck. They kept on coming, and my dad kept on shooting them as quickly as they could come.

                For a while, my dad faced the problem of disposing of the little squirrel corpses. At first, he tried putting them in the trashcan along with the everyday garbage, but the constant stench of a half-dozen decomposing rodent bodies quickly convinced him that this might be poor planning. Later, he tried tossing them into the marsh behind our house, but this too proved to be more trouble than it was worth when every dog, cat, raccoon, and bird of prey in a two-mile radius descended on our yard for a free lunch. Finally, as he found himself running out of viable options, my father resorted to storing the bodies in the kitchen freezer until he could find a more permanent solution for them. There, nestled between the Eggos and the Häagen-Dazs, the squirrels would stare back with wide, lifeless eyes, their tongues hanging out of gaping mouths, sometimes their bare entrails exposed by massive wounds.

I eventually grew used to the macabre presence of our new guests, but the same could not be said for my mother and sister. They would sneak downstairs in the middle of the night for some ice cream, only to be greeted by the sight of a squirrel clinging to the Rocky Road in rigor mortis, and they would subsequently flip a shit at maximum volume.

                As dedicated as my father was to eradicating the squirrels, he of course enlisted my help. It was my assigned task to guard the yard when he was at work or out of town. At first, I nearly couldn’t bring myself to harm the pesky critters. I rued that our home had been invaded by animals that were so incredibly Disneyesque. If our yard had been overrun by substantially less cute animals, such as snakes or rats, then I would have had no problem taking them out. But whenever I trained the crosshairs on a squirrel, I always felt slightly guilty about gunning down one of Uncle Remus’ forest friends. 

And when I finally shot, my victims looked up at me in their final moments, their breath shallow and panicked, hearts pounding, eyes flashing wildly, and they would seem to say,

“Will! You monster! Why? Oh, why? I have not deserved this! All of those times I called you ‘asshole’ were merely in jest! Oh, please, spare me!”

And I would say,

“I’m sorry. You eat my house.”

Then they would say something noble and Shakespearean with their final breaths, something along the lines of “Commend me to my kind lord; oh, farewell!” Then I would give them to the neighbor’s dog.

After a while, I started to grow weary of squirrel hunting, mainly because it struck me as an activity that the Antichrist would probably enjoy in his youth. And to a certain extent, my father and I had been the Antichrist to those squirrels. We had waged an exhaustive and merciless war on them. We had begun the Squirrelpocalypse.  

Eventually, after my father’s kill count had climbed well into the upper two hundreds, there were simply no squirrels left to eradicate. They had somehow gotten the picture, and they no longer inhabited our back yard. The roof remained intact for a full six months, and my dad finally decided to hang up the gun.

To this day, there remains a sort of unspoken treaty between my father and the squirrels. They agree not to chew any more holes into the attic, and he agrees not to blow their brains out. Every winter, when the newest batch of delinquent squirrels hits the scene, I can see his eyes wander fondly to the corner of the garage, where lies the Remington Air Master, just waiting for its next victim. But I am content to know that I will most likely never shoot another squirrel, and I sure as hell won’t ever watch The Exorcist again.