One morning less than half a block from home on my way to school when I was just eight years old I came across a fat squirrel stopped and alert six feet up the trunk of a huge tree maybe ten feet away from me. I stopped too. The squirrel and I looked at one another silent and still. I decided to throw something at it, I don't know why, and I looked around me for a suitable projectile.
Aha!
Right beside me, just off the sidewalk, lay a discarded, heavy, red paving brick. At best I thought I might startle the squirrel and scare it on up the tree. I could only heave the brick—with a grunt—from my shoulder as a shot putter might.
Thud.
To my complete astonishment the brick hit the squirrel flush in the back. It did not fall, it did not move—nor did I. Guilty now, sorry for what I had done, I just stood and watched to see what would happen. Stunned, hurt, perhaps seriously injured, the squirrel appeared to rest and to collect itself and then slowly, ever so slowly, it climbed, just one slow, tentative step at a time, up the tree and, contemplative, sad, I resumed my own slow stroll to school.
Animal.
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