All Creatures Great and Small

   Last Sunday morning, I stood with my daughter looking down from the back deck to where Chloe, our family dog, was pawing at something in the grass. It appeared to be a baby mouse. I'm not sentimental about small rodents, but I don't like the idea of it being tormented, so I went down to call off the dog.
   Chloe, although she is an Irish Setter, a sport dog, has never been trained for hunting. She is really very good natured, and in this case seemed to be curious more than anything else. But she was likely to kill the little thing with her paws just by trying to turn it over to see what it was.
   It turned out to be not a mouse, but a baby squirrel. Part of a nest was next to it, and it appeared to have fallen about twenty feet from the tree above. It never occurred to me before that squirrels had nests in trees. I guess I never even wondered where they lived. I assumed they lived in holes in the ground, and some apparently do. But those in my yard must be tree squirrels, which live in football sized nests called dreys. Now that I know that, I recognize that I've seen several of those nests in my yard but not recognized them for their real inhabitants. Doesn't say much for my curiosity about nature or even my own surroundings, I guess.
   I pulled Chloe away and shut her in the garage temporarily. Then I took a plastic garden hand shovel and picked up the little thing. I didn't want to touch it out of concern its mother might reject it. My son tells me that's a myth debunked by MythBusters, and I really wasn't confident the mother was going to come find it anyway. But I was trying to be compassionate. Problem is, I have no idea what to do for a baby squirrel, let alone this one that seemed to have hardly opened its eyes yet. It had fallen, been poked and scratched by a dog, and was likely going to die of hunger or thirst, if the local hawk didn't get it first. Not thinking I could do any better for it, I moved it out of reach of the dog and set it in the shade of a rock on the off chance its mother might find it.
   Then we went to church.
   By the time we got home, my daughter had told my sons all about it, along with her friends and teacher at church. She and one of the boys went out and found it in the yard (it had apparently crawled back in reach of the dog). They rescued it, put it in a box, and brought it in the house and pleaded with me to save its life.
   We've already established that I didn't know what to do. In addition, I wasn't excited about another squirrel in my yard. Those we already have got all my peaches again this year. In spite of all my precautions and preventative measures, I didn't get a single peach off either of my trees. They did stay on the tree a couple weeks longer than last year, but that's a meaningless success in the scope of this effort. So between the peaches and how the squirrels eat all the bird seed in our feeder, I'm not particularly fond of squirrels.
   "But it's going to die, Dad! We have to save it." "Look how cute it is." And alright, it was kind of cute.
   "How can we save it, Dad?" Somehow my "I don't know" only made them more desperate. They moped and pleaded and brainstormed. And, unknown to me until later, one of my sons went to his mother and asked her to pray with him for help to save the little critter.
   Not long after that my daughter went across the street to show it to her friend, and the friend's mother just happened to overhear and just happened to have some lady friends visiting, one of whom just happened to have saved a couple baby squirrels herself and had researched how to care for them.
   Coincidence? Only if coincidence means circumstances arranged in advance by an all-knowing God to allow help to appear when we ask for it.
   So the children had a plan, some knowledge, and we had acquired a new pet. And some new wisdom and greater faith in our Heavenly Father's attention to the prayers of His children.

   It's been a week now, and our youngest son has been incredibly responsible in caring for this little creature. He feeds it on a regular schedule, even setting his alarm to wake up in the middle of the night for a scheduled feeding. And the squirrel is thriving. It's become the center of attention when anyone comes over. And it has provided some rewarding learning and growing experiences for us all. It's still a squirrel, and I may regret this all next summer when my peaches are disappearing. But there's something wonderful about the innocence of my children and their love for God's creatures.

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
               -Cecil Frances Alexander