squirrel in the floor

the sweetie called to me from the bathroom. "can you hear that? he said. i could hear nothing over the sound of two full sets of dachshund toenails clacking on the wood floor as they came in to investigate. we picked them up and listened again. it sounded like they were still walking around. in the walls. the bathroom upstairs is under the eave of the house so half of it has ceiling and half of it is a slanted roof. the small clattering walking around sounded like where that slant of roof meets the wall, down near the baseboard. clatter clatter. a bit later, downstairs, it sounded like guthrie was walking around upstairs. clatter clatter. except for the fact that there are rugs where the walking was happening. and guthrie was snoozing on the sweetie's lap. it walked all over upstairs, from the front of the house to the back. and it sounded like a ten pound dachshund. clack. clatter.

i decided it must be a raccoon (because raccoons and i are sworn enemies and i blame them for many things) and began to harness the dogs up and put on their leashes. why? the sweetie wanted to know. in case it gets loose or is rabid. i don't want it chasing them or them chasing it. oh. the sweetie is used to this sort of thinking and frankly i'm surprised i had to explain things to him this time. he got the flashlight to investigate. he likes to investigate and i like that this usually means i don't have to investigate. i am shaggy to his fred. we'd been having a sporadic thunderstorm quite a bit of the evening but only the light show and sound effects were left as the sweetie stepped out into the wet night to find the creature.

he did not find it, but found how it got in. by the time the dogs and i got ourselves together and got outside to gawk into the darkness, the sweetie was saying, firmly, "well, he'll just have to come out." i didn't know who he meant and said so. the animal. of course. because saying it so forcefully will certainly make it so. i'm pretty sure mr. raccoon up there heard the sweetie and said, "dear, pack up the kids..... well, we've got to go...... i'm not sure, exactly. the people seem to think we should be somewhere else..... i know. if it's what they want."

when the sweetie showed me the hole the animal got in through, a place along the roof of the porch where two boards should meet but don't, i couldn't believe it. the animal making the noises in the house was too large to get through there. i was sure of it. i tried to imagine stuffing one of the dachshunds through there. not a chance. guthrie's little plow of a chest would get stuck, not to mention his rather un-dachshund-like backside. and max would simply refuse to fit by willpower and anger alone. he has that jedi thing.

but now it's clear that it's not likely a raccoon. maybe a squirrel. so when we are downstairs, there's something running around right over our heads. when we're upstairs, it's below our feet or in the walls. there's a pretty big amount of empty space inside our house we didn't know about. space we're going to shoot full of that sassy injectible insulation one of these days soon.

until then, the sweetie will fashion some sort of mechanism to get the thing out. a one way gate, so to speak, so the animal will be able to go back to the wild but no matter how many of his pals he tells about the place, none of them will be able to get back in. the sweetie knows how to do these things just like he knew how to rewire the lamp sitting across from me right now. just like he figured out how to build some contraption that removes humidity from the basement and managed to do most of the work on an ancient volvo for several years.

see, for me, every obstacle is a horrible raccoon, probably frothing with rabies, waiting to bite my poor, defenseless, little dogs. for the sweetie, everything he encounters is an opportunity to see if he can do something spectacular and unexpected.