I see you like squirrels. Yeah, me too. Who doesn’t?
They don’t count.
Listen, I’ll tell you something good about squirrels. Something nobody else has ever told you.
I’ll tell you why squirrels have big poofy tails.
No, shut up, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Yeah, yeah, your mom’s an ecologist, but shut up and listen you little scumbucket.
***
So there’s a squirrel. Regular old squirrel, of moderate stature and years. She lived in a highly lovely tree, and one particularly nice spring morning she ran down its trunk and was surprised to see a human being there, leaning against it. It wasn’t at all the season for that sort of thing.
“Hello,” said the squirrel. “Who are you?”
The human being turned its head to look up at her and the squirrel was somewhat surprised to see that it was unmistakeable the great disciple, sage, seer, prophet, fortune-teller, well-wisher, and dogs-body, Kem.
“I’m being pursued,” said Kem, “and I can’t stop to chat.”
“How about a bite to eat?”
“Can’t stop for that either.”
“Jeez,” said the squirrel, “you must be HUNGRY.”
“Thirsty, too,” said Kem. “But you know what I really miss?”
The squirrel didn’t know and said as much.
“Sleeping,” said the disciple-sage. “I haven’t had a nap in a decade. You see, I am continuously and constantly chased by the three great demons of Ignorance, Despair and Cruelty, and if I halt for a moment I’ll be caught and mangled by them.”
“Well, why don’t you put your feet up here and have a little rest?” asked the squirrel. “Being chased when you’re half-asleep never helps – trust me, I’ve lost a few cousins that way. And this is a really shady and most refreshing tree to sleep under. Besides, I can keep watch. You’ll be fine.”
“They are extremely great demons,” said Kem.
“My teeth are very sharp and never stop growing,” said the squirrel.
“Fair enough,” said Kem. And without so much as a good-night or thank-you-very-much the disciple-sage rolled up in a small and extremely holy ball and began snoring.
The squirrel combed through the disciple-sage’s pockets for any stray nuts and found nothing, then immediately climbed up to the top of her tree and began the watch. She didn’t have to wait long. The ground was trembling, the leaves were shaking, and over the horizon came the great demon Ignorance. It was sixty miles tall and forty miles broad and it had to walk bent double and double again to prevent its head from being lost high above the clouds. In each of its huge warty hands it carried a brutally spiked war-club the size of a well-travelled highway; from each of its ears dangled incongruously small but splendid little earrings, decorated with emeralds a deeper green than oak-leaves.
The squirrel was very impressed by Ignorance’s appearance and wondered if there was any deeper symbolic meaning behind it. “I’m very impressed by your appearance,” she told Ignorance. “I wonder if there’s any deeper symbolic meaning behind it?”
“Dunno,” said Ignorance in its small, somewhat flat voice. “Hey, you seen the disciple-sage, Kem?”
“No,” said the squirrel. “Hey, is that her?”
“Where?”
“Just over your shoulder.”
“Where?” asked Ignorance, craning its neck about three times.
“Your left shoulder.”
“Which left?”
“Your left.”
“Huh?” said Ignorance, twisting its head back around the other way six times.
“Now she’s right behind you.”
“Huh?!”
“Right above you now!”
Ignorance spun its head around five times each way, reared straight up, bonked its head on the moon and toppled over into outer space, dead as a doornail.
The squirrel checked the horizon, ate some nuts, explored the inside of the great disciple and sage Kem’s hat, and generally made up things to take up time. At last she sat on a branch, utterly deprived of things to do.
“I’m done,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” whispered the great demon Despair into her ear.
The squirrel nearly leaped out of her fur. The great demon Despair was very quiet, so very quiet indeed that it had crept right up to her in her tree without so much as a hint of a warning. This was in spite of both the fact that it was the size of a mountain range and was being dragged on top of a jeweled palanquin by the innumerable labouring efforts of millions of tiny nagging doubts. In its right hand it held a jeweled flog; in its right hand a blacksmith’s-puzzle made of two perfectly-trapped circlets; in its other right hand it clutched a few stray nuggets of mucus, as it was currently knuckle-deep in its nose.
“Get your finger out of there when you’re talking to someone,” said the squirrel sternly.
“Sorry,” sighed Despair, brushing crumbs out of its palm and flicking them into the distance. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? Well, I’ve screwed this up. Tell me, have you seen the great disciple-sage Kem?”
“Nowhere near here,” said the squirrel.
“Really?” asked Despair. “Not even under your tree, where I followed her tracks?”
“Nope,” said the squirrel.
“Not even huddled under that cloak and hat, which I have seen in the distance just ahead of me ten thousand times?”
“Not in a million years.”
Despair sighed again, a wind that dragged on forever. “Gosh, I’m just WORTHLESS,” it said wretchedly. “I can’t believe I’ve screwed up so badly. I can’t do anything right. I’m not a real person. I’m going to go home and never do anything again.”
And it did, towing its nagging doubts behind it like fishing-lines. The squirrel watched it leave, thoughtfully munching an acorn, then shrugged.
The great demon Cruelty was less subtle – and not merely because it was a vast and crawling thing with a thousand thousand arms and a million claws and sixteen hundred mouths with a billion very sharp teeth. It took an hour and a half to walk from the far horizon to the squirrel’s tree because it kept stopping to uproot and shred every blade of grass and crawling beetle it could see.
“HRRRNRNRNRNRNRNNRNRNRNGHGHGHGehehehehehehehhehehehehe,” it said to the squirrel.
“Hello,” said the squirrel.
“HRURURURURUURruururrrr,” said Cruelty, and it reached out with six of its arms.
“Are you looking for the great disciple-sage Kem?” asked the squirrel very quickly.
“HAHAHahahahayes indeed,” said Cruelty. It tore a few branches off the squirrel’s tree and began to strip the bark off them.
“Why?” asked the squirrel.
“I wish to commit unspeakable tortures upon her,” said Cruelty, idly scouring an ant colony with its heel. “I have plans.”
“Tell me,” said the squirrel.
“I just said they were unspeakable,” said Cruelty, and a wasp-whine of annoyance filled its sixteen hundred mouths. “There will be no words. Only flayings. And mutilatings. And wrenchings. And so on and so forth. There are a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components”
“Astounding,” said the squirrel. “How sure of them are you?”
Cruelty glared at the squirrel, eyelessly. “Very. My plans are astute and exact.”
“Well then luck is your ally! At the foot of this tree, vulnerable, blissful, and unaware, slumbers the great disciple and sage Kem!”
Cruelty clapped with glee and all its hands, knocking every bird in the sky senseless. “Hooray!” it said.
“Now go to work with your plan then,” said the squirrel. “Just don’t mess it up. Because you have only one chance and a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components.”
The great demon cruelty considered this. Then it considered the sky. Then it considered the squirrel. Then it considered the sky again.
Then it opened its mouth and said “well, I would begin at the forearm…”
“I don’t quite understand,” said the squirrel. “How do you mean?”
“Just here, at the nerve.”
“Where?”
“There are no words,” sighed Cruelty, and it held up its thousand thousandth favourite arm. “So. Starting from here…”
What was left of Cruelty in the end was just a few wayward atoms which quickly underwent isotopic decay and vanished just as Kem yawned and stretched herself upright.
“That,” she said, “is the best nap I’ve ever had. And also the only. Tell me, squirrel, did you find yourself troubled?”
“Somewhat,” admitted the squirrel. “But not to any great degree. Your demons are not very clever.”
“No,” agreed Kem. “But they are persistent, and I imagine they’ll be back someday. I think I owe you something all the same, mind. For the sake of a good nap on a kind spring morning.”
The great disciple and sage extended her hand and blew on her palm and then and there, nose to tail, the squirrel’s furry tail shifted and shook and shimmied until it had turned into a marvelous swirl of colour, every shade of the rainbow and more besides.
“Gosh, thanks,” said the squirrel.
“Don’t mention it,” said Kem. “Now shoo! I’ve got a load of ground to cover.”
***
Of course, next Wednesday the squirrel asked for her old tail back, since her marvelous rainbow-fur made her extremely visible to hawks, foxes, and cats. And thus it was that the squirrel acquired her tail, which was the same as her old tail. Sometimes life’s like that.