Squirrel Saga Part 3

In the womb baby sharks vie for survival eating each other until only one remains. A microcosm of the Highlander scenario. Straight out of the womb sharks are blood thirsty savages and I’m pretty sure it works the same for squirrels.

To be the ideal murder machine of the ocean sharks go through 50,000 teeth in a lifetime, up to 3,000 teeth at a time. A squirrel needs a mere 4 teeth to be just as dangerous. Do they practice gnawing on acorns pretending their thick human skulls?

Based on our ignorance, squirrels hide their numbers by traveling single file. The closet estimate we can come to in the United States is that there is a squirrel every 1.5 acres. Factoring for 747 million acres of inhabited land means we’re looking at 1.1 billion squirrels in the United States alone. That’s over 3 squirrels per man, woman, and child in our country. That means right now, while you read this, there is at least one squirrel within 500 feet of you. That’s nuts.

In 2017 a Squirrel in Brooklyn’s Battery Park attacked at least five people. At least! In 2015 a California squirrel attacked eight. Going for human heads, bodies, arms, whatever it could get. A victim of this incident is quoted as saying, “He jumped me three or four different times. When I got him off, he’d get back on.” Squirrel rampage is as old as time.

In 1921 a squirrel in Long Island went on a bloodthirsty rampage barreling straight for a group of school children. In 1878 a newspaper described the horrific events of a squirrel mauling a farm hand, bloodlust still unsated it went after the head farmer threatening that week’s payroll. How far back does this squirrel terror go? No one can be certain but some say it dates to the end of the ice age. Roughly the same time as the founding of this news source. The squirrel’s original prey was the sabretooth tiger because the squirrels were jealous of those really big teeth. The modern world is overrun with squirrels, not sabretooth tigers. Their victory was absolute.

Trees are the ultimate high ground and we’re constantly sacrificing the advantageous position to the squirrels. That cute bushy tail is more dangerous than a shark fin slicing through water.

Through minimal research I could not find a follow up to any of the squirrel attack articles above. Where are these people now? We don’t know. We can only hope that they recovered to live some sort of semblance of a life. Which brings us to the final act of the Squirrel Saga.

Millions of critics of I Hope This Is News are saying The Squirrel Saga Parts 1 & 2 aren’t actual news stories but rather fluff or odd personal tales better left between the writer and their therapist. However, the Squirrel Saga is the first reported ‘Where Are They Now’ story following up a squirrel attack.

If you survive a squirrel attack it’s because the squirrel wanted you to survive. They aren’t looking to kill like sharks. They see torture as an art. They don’t want you dead they want you shattered.

The Squirrel Saga illuminates a psyche broken right down the middle post squirrel attack. A fractured mind rambling to itself as both investigative journalist and editor all in one. A broken man who has seen the worst god has to offer and knows bravery merely because that’s all that remains after experiencing ultimate terrors.

This courage allows such a man to tread where no one else has dared to go. Telling the hard-hitting news stories mass media is too afraid to pursue. A journalist who can uncover acorns long thought to never see the light of day ever again.

Toiling away as both journalist and editor you hope that your readers find that acorn that can bring a bit of enlightenment during a winter of fake news.

The physical claw marks of the squirrel may have healed and faded away from your hand but the memory remains buried deep. Lean back after completing the last sentence of an article and out loud you say to your shattered self: “I hope I covered this story properly. I Hope This Is News.”