Poor Squirrel Nutkin

This is a story about a big squirrel, one of the elder ones in my trees. It happened several weeks ago, and I hesitated to say anything about it, lest people think I was lying in my teeth. I've also been looking around for dead squirrels on the ground or in the street around my place, but haven't seen any since the Happening. So hopefully she/he recovered from whatever it was.

I opened the deck door to let Mo out, and saw furious movement out by the chipmunk stump. Ran and got my binoculars instead of running out there, and it was this big squirrel having some kind of a seizure. She (I swear!) did back flips, and then she would run back to a certain spot and then start whirling around and turning flips in midair. After a few minutes, she managed to get to a tree trunk and ran up the tree.

I carefully marked the spot that she kept running back to between aerobatic flips, and after a while I went out there to see if I could see anything. Was sort of afraid it was a snake or something. But all around under the trees out there, were these awful-looking, spiky, dried-up skeletons of some kind of huge mushrooms. They looked like big clumps of doormats that had lost all their threads and left the fiber sticking up all over. I sort of believe that the squirrel had eaten some of this mess and had the psychedelic contortions because of it.

Now that I've written it down, maybe it'll quit bothering me.