Still in a Daze at the Cottage

by Ross, James 1744-1827;

  “Watch this,” she told the kids. Stripey jammed two of the nuts into his spacious jowls, but could fit no more. He stood staring at the other two peanuts, wondering what to do. He decided to cache what he had and then quickly return for the others, but as soon as he bounded off into the forest, Grandma stepped out on the deck and confiscated the remaining nuts. Upon his return, Stripey was flummoxed. He ran around in a panic, even taking a tumble down the deck stairs that Grandpa was in the middle of rebuilding. He returned to the big window and stared back in the room with his big sad chipmunk eyes.

  Grandma put another four peanuts on the deck. We watched as the chipmunk tried to figure out what to do. He stored two in Grandpa’s sandals, and then gathered the other two in his mouth and loped off again, looking quite pleased with himself. Once again Grandma snitched the remaining nuts, and Stripey returned to frustration. He was stocking his winter larder two nuts at a time, but was also frustrated with always losing out by half. Certainly, though it was evident that Stripey had an affection for Grandma and her bag of peanuts, he was a changed character by the time we departed. His tail was fuller, his eyes glazed, and he had a nervous tic and a blinking affliction. We had a good laugh at these antics, and watching Grandma have a little fun with the cute chipmunk gave me a grand idea of how to get back at my own impertinent squirrel at the cottage.

  Chirpy, the squirrel! You do remember Chirpy? He is the one who made a complete fool of me in front of my wife and children. He is the rascally rodent that drove me nutty, and ended up having a bird feeder named in his honour — “Chirpy’s Diner.” I know what you’re thinking. How can a little bushy-tailed rodent even come close to challenging me in a battle of wits? How can a tiny-brained furball possibly compete with my advanced intellect? I will remind you, however, that he is an unusually smart squirrel.

  Well, no matter, in taking my lead from Grandma and her way with poor Stripey, I realize some fun can be had at my squirrel’s expense. Before heading up to the cottage, I drop into the grocery store to buy a couple of jumbo bags of peanuts, and I begin to put my plan into action.

  As my parents have done at their Muskoka home, we have tried to establish a bit of a bird sanctuary around our island cottage, for we enjoy the company of birds, their morning song and their distraction on a sunny afternoon. Perhaps they are not as well organized or stocked as at my folks’ cottage, but we do have a variety of different bird feeders, along with a few birdhouses and nesting boxes. How does Chirpy fit into our aviary? Well, perhaps he thinks he is a bird, and who am I to say that this type of wildlife is welcome here and that type is not?

  In a daily exercise, I fill the many bird feeders that hang around the cottage. I walk around with my ladder and a bucket of mixed seed, climb up to the tree branches, and try to figure out how to gain access to the squirrel-proof feeders. Chirpy follows me around, emptying out the fancy feeders as fast as I can fill them. Sometimes he gets impatient if I’m delayed by a particularly puzzling one, and he chitters at me angrily. When I look over at him, he motions with his tiny forepaws, demonstrating how I should twist the top to open it up.

  Do Chirpy’s shenanigans bother me? Not really. I’ve battled with him in the past, and our coexistence here at the cottage has now settled into an easy truce. Better put, he has won our battle and remains in charge. I am hoping, however, that if I follow Grandma the “rodent whisperer’s” lead, I will be able to exact a little revenge on my bushy-tailed friend. At the very least, surely it will force him to lose some of his cockiness.

  Throughout the first morning of this visit, I wave around the bag of peanuts every time I see or hear the squirrel, and then place a number of them on the porch. Though this does not immediately bring the squirrel running (only my son), I am persistent in the task and find by afternoon that I’m making some headway. Chirpy’s countenance has gone from one of completely ignoring me, to distrusting me, to showing a mild interest. Finally, he haltingly approaches the cottage to pocket the offering. I do notice that Chirpy has a big mouth — I guess I knew that all along — and he stuffs four peanuts into his spacious cheeks. I return to my “evil plan” notebook and reconfigure my calculations.

  By early evening I have the obnoxious squirrel coming to the big picture window of the cabin. He peers in and, when he catches my eye, he smiles and wags his bushy tail. It is time for phase two of my plan. The squirrel steps back to give me space, and I set out some peanuts on the porch. Six peanuts in the shell are put in a neat pile, for that is what my quick math tells me is necessary for my evil plan to succeed. Chirpy gathers up the peanuts and manages to store the four. He tries for one more, but finds there is no room. He decides to go cache what he has, and then hurry back for the other two. I run back to my notebook to remind myself what I am supposed to do now. Following Grandma’s example, I step out and remove the other two nuts. This unsettles the squirrel. He looks back in the window and chirps, angrily ordering more peanuts. I repeat the trick. This time, Chirpy tries to stuff four in his mouth and then carries the remaining two under his arms, not easy for a squirrel that needs his four legs to climb. The funny little battle goes on through the evening. Chirpy tries kicking the extra nuts along, but when he leaves them at the base of his tree, I dutifully gather them up. Chirpy is at his wit’s end. He is beaten, and I feel a little bit of my own self-esteem is restored.

  What a great day! I walk down to my boathouse bunkie to settle in for the night, taking a moment’s pause on the trail to laugh up at Chirpy in his tree. Finally, I have gotten the better of him.

  Satisfied, happy, and tired, I crawl into my comfortable bed, planning to have my best sleep in some time. Instead, I find my soft sheets covered in scratchy peanut shells. “Aw, nuts!”

  “Chirpy!!!” I yell, and hear the darn squirrel chirping merrily outside.

  I Heard a Robin Call My Name

  She’s back!

  I know, I know ... you think I’m obsessed with the species Turdus migratorius. You think I’m captivated by her plump red breast, and perhaps you’re right. After all, I used to enjoy visiting the cottage in springtime, I used to dream happy thoughts about our island escape, now I have nightmares about that psychotic bird.

  You may laugh at this irrational fear, but I feel my lunatic robin has been stalking me for several years now. Readers of my stories will remember this same bird trying to smash through my cottage windows and haunting me while I tried to work inside. Then, the next year, she returned and brazenly decided to build her nest on the pontoon of my big vessel, threatening me with death by pecking if I dared to boat before the little blue eggs hatched and the squawking brood had matured enough to leave home.

  So, it was with a great deal of trepidation that I ventured to the cottage this May. I had opened up the place early this year, hoping to get in before the nesting season. This week I returned, hoping that, by now, the robin’s rearing time was over and done. I was quick to find out it was in full swing. I had brought in our provisions and dashed around the side of the cabin intent on turning on the propane. Instead, I saw my robin sitting in a tidy nest nestled on top of the hundred-pounder. She flew right at me and forced me indoors.

  At first I was angry, and contemplated all sorts of methods of ridding myself of this demonic Turdidae. I thought of tying one of my huskies to the tank, but imagined them running around pulling a hundred-pound bomb and scrapped that idea. I could make a bow and arrow out of willow and string. Perhaps I could just sharpen myself a spear with my jackknife. I looked out the window at my robin.

  I quickly became fascinated by this robin’s world. I watched for hours as the attentive mother returned again and again to the nest. Four long necks would stretch out, heads high and beaks wide open, asking for food. She would diligently try to sate their hunger, but the youngsters seemed never satisfied, always begging for more. Back and forth she flew, scouring the rocky soil for worms. The humid heat of the day took its toll on her, and the dry, parched earth did not yield much of a worm cro
p.

  I sat in the kitchen munching away on a ham and cheese sandwich, feeling sorry for my former adversary’s predicament. Then, she hopped over on the windowsill and looked in at me. Her look was no longer a threatening stare, no longer were her eyes two red coals of hate. Rather, she seemed to be imploring me for help, begging me to save her children.

  Now, I’ve always been known as a man of action, quick to rush to the aid of a friend. I instinctively knew what had to be done. I grabbed the pitchfork from the shed and started to toil on our humble garden patch. I turned the soil. Did the back-breaking labour wear me down? Yes it did. Did the oppressive heat of the day make me want to quit? For sure, but I didn’t quit, I forked and turned and forked and turned, until the whole garden had been tilled. Then, in the same manner that my robin friend flew back and forth to feed her brood, I ran back and forth to the lake with my watering can and soaked the broken earth. The worms finally came to the surface, the robin rejoiced, and I went for a swim. Her babies were saved.

  Where once she had drawn her wing tip across her white throat in a threatening display, now, when I pass by, she tips her wing feathers in a formal salute and gives me a wink of her eye. The robin whom I once feared now sings beautifully to me each morning, and sometimes in the evening. I fancy that she is tweeting my name. Let this be a lesson to all of us, not to fear nature, but to embrace her in all of her glory.

  The Seven Day Itch

  I had a restless sleep about a week ago, tossing and turning and sweating — smacking and rubbing my left arm. I was having a nightmare, dreaming that I was in my tent on a canoe trip, but my arm was laying outside of the protective screening. I was getting attacked by millions of mosquitoes. It was like some old television commercial — you know, the one where the guy puts his bare arm into a container filled with the blood-sucking pests. They cover his skin in a feeding frenzy. That commercial always made me squeamish, and itchy. It was promoting the use of some insect repellent, I don’t recall the brand.

  Well, here I was getting devoured in a similar manner. I woke with a start and a scream in my own bed at home and not in some open tent by a river. There were no mosquitoes around, in sight or in sound. Still, my left arm both ached and itched. I rubbed it, and it seemed to be covered by a million bites. I turned on the bedside lamp and stared at ugly red welts, stretching from elbow to wrist on the inside of my arm.

  I was horrified. “Are you awake?” I asked my darling spouse, in need of her comfort.

  “How can I not be with you screaming and thrashing about all night!” she growled. I showed her my arm. “No idea,” says she. “Looks like some kind of allergic reaction. Don’t touch me with that thing, and get to sleep.”

  So much for comfort — get to sleep, she says; sure, to sleep, perhaps to dream. No, I had to think. After ruminating semi-quietly for some time, I suddenly had a flashback vision of walking at a friend’s cottage this weekend past and pushing back a shrub with my left arm as I ambled along. “Poison ivy!” I shouted, much to my wife’s chagrin.

  It has been some time since I have gotten myself tangled up with the genus Rhus radicans, the three-leafed plant that flourishes in cottage country. We are lucky in that we do not have the plant on our island. It also didn’t exist in western Canada, where we lived until recently. My itchy forearm did have me reminiscing about the many battles I had with the oily ivy when I was young.

  If the plant was around, I seemed to find it back then. If it grew somewhere along a portage trail, that was the spot that I slumped down for a rest with my heavy pack. If I was playing with friends at their cottage, the patch of poison ivy was my hiding spot. If I was hiking with friends and wandered behind a tree to relieve myself, I would be standing in it, and thankful that the variety in which I stood was the ground-hugging type. If I leaned back in the grass, trying to look cool and confident while chatting with a female friend I admired, she would say, “I don’t think I would be lying there.” (Shot down before I even asked.) I think I spent most of my youthful days with some part of my body covered in the itchy red eruption.

  I told my wife about the last time I had suffered from the scourge of the poison ivy. I must have rolled around in it, because, when I departed for my first year of university and a frosh week that promised much interaction with a variety of young female students, I was covered head to toe in the unsightly red rash. “I guess that was why I was still available when you came along,” I teased her.

  “Well, if that’s what you want to blame it on,” was her retort.

  Here I was suffering from the seven day itch, and what sympathy did I get?

  The Frog Whisperer

  My mother-in-law talks to bullfrogs. Don’t laugh, I am being serious. I don’t mean in a “frog whisperer” sense, although that certainly has its possibilities. She doesn’t train frogs, like a horse whisperer breaks young colts or works with the behavioural problems of high-strung horses, or a dog whisperer trains puppies or corrects cantankerous canines. She just chit-chats with bullfrogs, in a unique and bizarre kind of way.

  There seems to be a lot of frogs about this summer season. They bound out of our way as we walk down the trail at night or leap into the water by “swim rock” as we stand contemplating our own leap of faith. There are the chorus frogs, the spring peepers whose melodic, clear notes sooth us in the twilight hours, sending us to peaceful sleep. Then there is the big bullfrog, who is a resident of our shoreline and likes to hide out under the cribs that support our sitting deck at the base of the dock. One can be sitting reading, and then from under the boards comes a vibrant, sonorous belch, “riddut,” deep and resonant.

  I wander down to the dock in the early morning with my big moose coffee mug in my hand and nighttime cobwebs still in my head. Mama and Papa, as my kids affectionately call their grandparents on my wife’s side, are early risers and already settled, enjoying the rising sun. I plunk myself down in my Muskoka chair and hope that, other than a grunted “good morning,” I will not have to engage in any form of intelligent conversation for a few minutes. I needn’t have worried. As I said, my wife’s mother was fully engaged with old Mr. Bullfrog.

  She is sitting drinking her tea and working her way through the last few pages of the book she is reading. My father-in-law is towelling off, having just taken his ritual early-morning, wake-up-the-entire-lake dip. “Oooooo — Ahhhhh!” he is groaning in apparent ecstasy, “that’s the only way to start the day.” He slumps in his chair and dries his legs and feet.

  “Ribbit!” says the bullfrog, from his home under our dock pilings. “Ribbit,” rolling his Rs — a sound soft and guttural.

  “What’s that, dear?” asks my mother-in-law.

  “I didn’t say anything,” harrumphs Papa, absorbing himself in a magazine.

  I look at Mama out of the corner of my eye, a bit astonished, as I thought she was being facetious, making fun of Papa’s voice. That wasn’t her usual style. Seeing her expression, I’m convinced that she had responded to the frog’s croak in all seriousness.

  “I’m almost finished this book,” Mama says, holding up some David Baldacci paperback. “I’ve enjoyed it, if you’re looking to start a new one.” She knows that he finished his own novel the night before, and it’s her way of getting him to sit down and be quiet.

  “Redditt!” croaks the plump frog.

  “Really?” responds my mother-in-law, a little put out. “You’ve read this? I just got it.”

  “Pardon?” says Papa, looking up. I stare at both of them, a little mystified, but now very much awake. I consider telling them about my friendly bullfrog that lives under our dock, but only briefly. Why waste a good thing? Instead I get up, stretch, and toss the dregs from my cup into the grass. I want to get my notebook and pen from the cottage — this is good stuff. I ask if anybody needed anything.

  “Not for me,” says she.

  “I’ll have a top-up,” says Papa, flexing his back and grimacing.

  “Rummit,” comes the deep bass v
oice of the frog.

  “A little early for that,” I hear my mother-in-law muttering, and then, in a louder voice, she asks, “Is your back sore this morning?”

  “A bit, must have slept on it wrong.”

  “Rubbit!” croaks the frog.

  “Not likely,” responds the lady who talks to frogs.

  “What?” says her perplexed husband.

  I love this place, I’m thinking. I love the nature here. And I wonder whether a bullfrog has a sense of humour.

  “Kiss me!” says the frog — or was that just my imagination?

  Twilight at the Cottage

  When we have family at the cottage, my wife and I like to sleep in our boathouse bunkie. We open wide the big double doors to the night, so we can look out over the lake. The bed is like one of those four-posters, with a big, sweeping mosquito mesh hanging down to keep the bloodsuckers at bay.

  This summer we have had a different guest visiting us in the night. It is a very quiet intruder, but I am a light sleeper and often the littlest rustle makes me open an eye. I catch a glimpse of the creature’s small, dark form against the starlit night. It flies slower than a bird and more erratically, zigzagging through the night air. I hear the gentle fold of its velvety wings, like a soft whisper. I see it here, and then there, and then it vanishes out the door into the blackness. I’ve heard that bats feast on mosquitoes, so its presence is certainly welcome.

  The only time I worry about the bat during these midnight visits is when the sound emanating from its gentle wings disappears, and in the silence I look out beside the bed and half expect to see a certain count looking in on me. Or, perhaps, I’ll see a girl I knew in high school, a fine young lady who was fondly nicknamed “Hoover,” because of her propensity to leave bruise-like marks around the neck area of every young fellow she dated. I remember her as a pretty enough girl, with milky white skin, seemingly untouched by the sun’s rays. When the bat’s wings fell silent on this night, I squinted into the darkness, fearful that I saw the sweet girl’s glowing silhouette. I fretted about how I would explain the marks on my neck to my wife in the morning.