While hiking alone the other day a young squirrel ran up my leg and torso, down my arm and sat on my palm. Shocked and entranced, I stood still while he stared me down as if to say, "Well, where's the grub?" Or maybe he thought I was a tree and was just as freaked out as I was. Then he started nibbling my palm, so I tried to shake him off. He ran up my arm, behind my neck and started chewing on my braid. I shooed him and he ran to the top of my head. At this point I was so weirded out I started flailing my arms. I tried to grab him but he dug his claws in and clung to my hair. Then he ran down my shoulder and clamped on to my earlobe and started eating my earrings, which were leeks. He actually gnawed through both pairs of my earrings, creating bite marks and taking off layers of leaves.
Luckily a man came along and I yelled, "HELP! A baby squirrel is attacking me! I can't get him off. He's eating my leek earrings!"
I'm quite sure I looked, and sounded, insane. Probably not for the first time in my life.
The man pulled the squirrel off of me and he skittered to the dirt. We all froze for a moment. And then the squirrel ran back up my body to my ears again. He wanted more Fimo leek. The man and I started jumping around, he couldn't believe it either, and we finally got the squirrel off me again and the man yelled, "RUN!"" and I took off along the trail with the squirrel in hairy, hungry pursuit.
The last thing I heard the man shout was, "If you have this same problem with bears, you are on your own!"
I managed to outrun the baby squirrel and finally stopped a kilometer or so down the path to inspect the damage to my earrings and body. No broken skin, thankfully, but my poor leeks looked like, well, like a rodent got to them.
Just the night before I had been having a conversation with my friend about how I have never really felt the need to do a lot of drugs because reality has always about as intense as I can handle. Sometimes people look at me funny when I say things like this. I'm sure they think I'm just being melodramatic. I don't bother explaining that it isn't because I am a wimp, or become easily overwhelmed by emotion or new experiences, but because in real life baby squirrels attack me unprovoked and eat my jewelry while strange men pull them out of my hair. Shit like this happens all the time. No hallucinogens required.
