When Adelaide Befriended A Squirrel

Adelaide used to tell us this story often. She carried this narrative with her in a cool layer beneath her skin. And because her storytelling gaze always shone with stubborn hope, even in the darkest hours, We never grew tired of hearing her tale.  

According to Adelaide, in the time before We met her, the trees had been sick for as long as she could remember. Because of the Great Famine, most of the forest was feverish, wilting beneath the late summer sun. 

In the memories that Adelaide often struggled to grasp, her mother told her that the forest once flourished in the same warm shades of emerald and amber that swirled in Adelaide’s eyes. She could see a faint glimmer of that past glory, but mostly she saw rotting hues of gray. Leaves as fragile as ash clung to skeletal branches. The gnarled trees’ bark split open, oozing scarlet and yellow sap like pus from a wound. And even the once mighty coniferous trees ceased to be evergreen.  

Adelaide sometimes tried to be careful of where she stepped, but when she chose not to care, she’d have the pleasure of pulling black thorns out of her feet before going to sleep. Even before resting against the strongest tree she could find, she prayed its insides wouldn’t be hollowed by insidious parasites in the humid night. 

Yet, despite all the decay, Adelaide refused to accept that the forest was dying. With every fiber of her being, Adelaide believed that the Great Famine would end eventually. Her prayers would be answered and the world that she had only begun to imagine would teem with life again. 

Adelaide also refused to accept her own physical decline. As she foraged for food among the trees or collected water from a weak stream, storing it all in jars she’d made from mud, her legs would suddenly tremble from fatigue.  She’d take that as a demand to lay down on her back and search for the blues of the sky to steady her, resting her head on her beloved threadbare supply sack.

There were enough berries, herbs, and nuts for her to subsist, but only barely enough, as made clear to Adelaide at that time by her protruding rib cage and her brown skin becoming translucent. She refused to succumb to the temptation of hunting animals for food like some of the men in her tribe had. They were  breaking sacred tradition out of desperation. No matter how greedily hunger carved into her stomach, Adelaide knew she could not eat another creature. It would never come to that. She would hold fast as her parents always taught her. 

Perhaps, in a twisted way, it was a blessing that she only needed to provide for herself for a season. We would come to know her as one who loved others to the dangerous realms of self-sacrifice.  

Adelaide’s body helped her forget how long she had been alone. If she had to guess, Adelaide had probably been alone for years. Her body carried itself though days that collapsed into nights. But her mind was not as kind. Memories were comforting and cruel to her. Adelaide’s thoughts often wandered as she gathered berries. She missed her tribe. She missed her Common Tongue lessons from the silver-haired elders. She missed learning about the forest’s hidden treasures of healing ingredients for new remedies. Most of all, she missed her family, especially her mother. 

With memory’s betrayal, Adelaide could recall her mother’s words, but not the rich timbre of her mother’s voice. From time to time, Adelaide even forgot the sound of her own voice, which is hard for us to imagine for a voice so memorable. But then again, she didn’t talk much since there was no one to talk to. Her tongue would stick to the roof of her mouth from lack of use. However, she said her prayers aloud at night, always beginning with the verse her mother taught her: 

Dear God, thank You for life.

Thank you for carrying me through strife. 

Thank you for another day. 

Thank you for this voice I can use to pray. 

Adelaide eventually taught us this prayer too and We would all say it together on occasion. But while Adelaide was alone, as she plucked multicolored berries off of weary branches, filling  her deep earthen jars, the prayer and other flecks of wisdom from her mother would weave through her mind. 

Never eat the violet manayare berries, Adelaide’s mother would also say. They grow from greed and steal more from you than they ever give.

 Whether this was just her mother’s more poetic way of saying the manayare berries were the poisonous fruit of a parasitic plant, or a warning against a more sinister power, Adelaide could never be sure. But ever since the last time she heard her mother’s voice, she doubted that her struggle was just against flesh and blood. 

Run, Addy! Run until the night swallows the sun! 

Those were the last words that Adelaide ever heard from her mother. And she had screamed them in their native tongue, a guttural roar with a metallic edge that pierced through the trees.

Before her heart and mind could protest, Adelaide did run, with her then newly woven supply sack slung over her shoulder. She ran as she heard more screams from the direction of her tribe’s encampment. She ran as she could almost feel the crack of metal through wood, and then, of metal through flesh and bone. She ran as she smelled smoke. She ran as parts of her soul left her body as she realized her family’s blood cried out from the forest floor. And as her mother demanded, Adelaide ran until the night swallowed the sun. 

In many ways, other than foraging for food, gathering water, and preparing remedies, running was what she had continued to do. 

But the beginning of Adelaide’s loneliness was not where her tale would end. 

 Another fateful day, perhaps years into her solitude, Adelaide saw that her earthen jar was only half-full of small berries and she had picked a whole tree clean. She couldn’t see another berry nearby. Just bare branches and twisted thorns. 

Adelaide pressed her hand into the tree’s bark and whispered, “Thank you for your fruit. May God strengthen you.” 

She then moved on in search of a new tired tree. 

Suddenly, out of the corner of her left eye, Adelaide saw a blur of gray fall down, presumably from a tree branch. She winced at the sickening thump against the ground and the sharp snap of stubborn sticks. 

Adelaide turned toward the sounds’ source. 

There, trembling on the forest floor, was a small gray squirrel. Adelaide gasped. She used to play with squirrels when she was younger, but they seemed to disappear from the trees as food dwindled. There was never quite a mass exodus, but all kinds of animals had drifted out of the forest as the Great Famine tightened its grip. 

But here was this squirrel, and as Adelaide neared it, she saw the squirrel’s eyes glazed over with a sickly gray mucus. The trembling was even worse than assumed from afar, the squirrel’s whole body writhing. The squirrel retched and a deep purple froth pooled out of its mouth, seeping into the dying roots below. 

Goodness, Adelaide thought, is this squirrel diseased or…

Something, perhaps a guardian angel, told Adelaide to look up at the hanging branch above. 

And there they were, a small cluster of jewel-like violet berries. 

“Manayare,” Adelaide whispered in awe and horror. She looked down at the poor squirrel as it shook even more violently. 

Adelaide’s heartbeat quickened. Her palms began to sweat. 

“Goodness gracious, what do I do?,” she mumbled. 

Oh wait. Adelaide remembered the small jar of distilled aduro sap wrapped in a protective cloth at the bottom of her supply sack. The golden miracle fluid took forever to prepare and Adelaide knew she was only supposed to use it for absolute emergencies. A seizing squirrel qualified as such. Thankfully, since the needed dose depended on weight, Adelaide reasoned the squirrel wouldn’t need much to stabilize. Just two drops on the tip of the tongue. 

Adelaide unwrapped the jar and knelt down next to the squirrel, who was apparently female. 

“Don’t worry,” Adelaide coaxed in her native tongue. “I’m here to help you, ma’am.”

Perhaps Adelaide imagined it, but the squirrel seemed to calm down at the sound of her voice, the shaking slowing ever so slightly. Good. That would make Adelaide’s job easier. 

She found a sturdy leaf on the forest floor and rolled it into a thin tube. Then, with a measured deftness, Adelaide removed the lid from the jar, used the leaf tube like a straw to draw in the fluid, pinched the top of the leaf tube to create the pressure to hold in the aduro, and carried it over to the squirrel. 

One, two drops on the tip of the tongue. 

Adelaide sat down and watched intently as the squirrel’s trembling slowed and the storm-like grayness in her eyes cleared to a lucid night-black. Adelaide also marveled at the bold streak of the same night-black in the squirrel’s otherwise gray tail. It all only seemed to take moments, but by the time the squirrel was well enough to stand upright, the sky teased the arrival of twilight. 

Breaking the hazed silence, Adelaide said, “I’m glad to see that you are feeling better, ma’am. You had me scared for a minute. Manayare berries are really dangerous after all.”

But the squirrel’s gaze was still laced with pain.  There were greedy black thorns from the forest floor piercing into her hind paws and legs. And since Adelaide hadn’t been careful of where she stepped during the whole ordeal, thorns gored into her numb feet as well. 

It was in Adelaide’s nature to take immediate action to solve a problem, an innate reflex for her. The squirrel was still and trusting as Adelaide removed all the thorns. After the careful procedure, Adelaide covered the squirrel’s wounds and her own with the same green gel-like salve she would eventually use on us. The salve dried in the breeze of the stirred evening.                                                                                                                                           

Finally, as Adelaide slowly stood up, the squirrel gingerly nuzzled her head against Adelaide’s ankle. And for the first time in a long time, Adelaide smiled. 

“Is it okay if I call you Muriel?,” Adelaide whispered,  “If we’re going to be friends, you ought to have a name.” 

With no signs of protest, Adelaide began to walk through the forest once more, now with Muriel following at her heels, as they both looked for that night’s resting tree. 

Each time Adelaide finished telling us this story, crystalline tears welled up in her eyes.

There’s nothing quite like the joy of no longer being alone.