The sound of claws clacking on grooved maple bark alerted me that a squirrel was near.
I stretched my neck to see a pointy nose peering around the tree trunk. Then I waved my peanut at the cautious boy.
“I’ve got a nut. You know you want it. C’mon.”
Iggy jokes that the next-door neighbors have a tape recorder running. Oy, what if my corporate clients heard one of those tapes? But I couldn’t worry about that. I had a more important job — luring one shy squirrel off his arboreal perch.
The squirrel disappeared for a moment, then his small body hit the ground. He traced a slow cautious semicircle across the patio and into the hedge behind me.
I waited.
Then his nose poked out of the bushes at the same level as the top of the shepherd’s hook. That’s where I often leave a nut when I can’t get a taker in-person. He turned his head slowly, examining every inch of the arm that extends out from the top of the metal rod.
I mimicked his motion, swinging my hand from right to left and back again. His eyes locked on the peanut between my thumb and forefinger. He was hooked.
The squirrel descended. He walked slowly onto the patio. He stopped. He stood up on his hind legs as if to say, “Here I am. Gimme.”
I kept swinging the nut, trying to hypnotize the squirrel with the pendulum-like movement of my paw — oops, I mean hand.
He moved forward one inch. And one inch to the side. He watched. I swung. He moved one inch. He watched. I swung.
All of the sidestepping meant he wasn’t getting much closer. The poor guy, he’d moved well beyond his comfort zone.
I took pity on him and threw the nut to him.
He pounced, incisored, and twirled in one fluid motion.
And then he left me.