The other day, I had said that I wasn't going to worry myself or lose any sleep over the survival potential of a tailless squirrel in the city. And I didn't until the tailless squirrel changed my mind.
Which is a way of saying I found the rest of the squirrel. Arriving home after work on the rainy early evening of last Friday, I noticed an unpleasant odor by my mailbox. It was the smell of rotting meat, the smell of death. Looking around, it didn't take long to find from where it was coming - the carcass of the rest of the tailless squirrel was stuffed in a small rain downspout by the mailbox.
It wasn't pleasant to look at, all soggy and gross, and it smelled just awful, but I noticed that the squirrel was also at least partially disemboweled. That piqued my curiosity, so I held my nose and looked a little closer and saw that there were actually two dead squirrels in the downspout.
How could that happen? Who or what could do that? An animal, say a fox or a dog, might kill a squirrel and rip it open, but I doubt that either predator, dog or fox, would then stuff the carcass into a drainpipe. Much less twice. It's possible that a gravely injured squirrel might have run into the drainpipe for protection from a predator before it died of its injuries in there, but the chances of that happening twice the same day seem pretty remote.
Could a person have done it? And if so, why? If someone were sweeping the street, say, or just out walking their dog and were horrified or offended by the two dead squirrels and felt that they had to do something, they would most likely have just tossed them into woods across the street from me, not stuff them both into a drainpipe. It just doesn't make sense.
Or was someone trying to say something to me? It does have a sinister, Mafioso kind of connotation to it. But in all honesty, I don't believe that I have any enemies, certainly no one motivated enough to go all Godfather on me with dead animals. Sure, not everyone loves me, not everyone's by BFF, but I truly believe I haven't done anything to make someone want to stuff two gross squirrels into a drainpipe. And finally, even if I'm wrong, there's a lot stronger threats one could have made with the carcasses - leave them on my doorstep, say, or put them in my mailbox. Not stick them into a pipe where they probably wouldn't even have been noticed if it were not for the smell.
It's a complete mystery, and one to which I'll probably never learn the answer. Any theories? Why are there dead squirrels in my drainpipe?
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