His fur was staring, and he never seemed to have strength enough to clean himself. All his little lickings and bitings and scratchings ceased. As the days passed he became more and more feeble. I only saw him for five or ten minutes in the twenty-four hours. He became painfully thin; his lustrous eyes were dim and apparently sunk in their sockets, instead of bulging out as all squirrels’ eyes do.
What vexed me was my powerlessness, and his pitiful shrinking from me. When I tried to coax him with endearing words, and food in my hand, he would feebly scramble away from me and cease eating altogether. “Why, oh, why!” I asked myself bitterly, “did I ever have squirrels in confinement?”
Fritz was perfectly well and strong out in the open, bounding about from tree to tree, and voraciously hungry whenever he visited the stump or the nut traps.
Still I never guessed that Peter was suffering from a chill. “Squirrels,” I read in a natural history book—no natural history books tell one much about them—“squirrels invariably die of one thing, and that is inflammation of the lungs; and nothing can cure them—they die in a very few days.”
It did not seem to me possible that Peter had inflammation of the lungs. There was no cough, no running at the nose—just emaciation and feebleness and loss of appetite. I gave him milk with sugar in it every day. He took a few tiny laps of it, and I thought it must be nourishing and helpful. I learnt afterwards that milk was one of the worst things to give. The books said that squirrels died of lung trouble “in a very few days.” Peter was ill more than four weeks. Soon he became too feeble to crack his nuts, so I cracked them for him; and he would eat perhaps one and a half during the five or ten minutes he was out of the sleeping-box in the mornings.
It was melancholy to see the effort it was to the poor little creature to climb back to his nest. He had to wait for breath and for strength four or five times before he finally disappeared.
By the 14th February Ruby, who had hitherto kept well and sprightly, though she also slept twenty-three hours and a half out of the twenty-four—unlike Fritz, who was to be seen several times a day in the coldest weather—Ruby, to my great grief, began to exhibit the same signs of illness as poor little Peter had shown. Her coat became rough and staring, her eyes sunken and dull, and her appetite nil. She grew as emaciated as he, and as painfully feeble. Morning after morning it was more and more difficult to her to clamber down from her sleeping-box, and worse to clamber up again. She, too, lost strength even to crack her nuts. In vain I bought grapes and every dainty I could think of.
