Another fairydiddle story. That August, the blackberries were humongous! And my fairydiddle loved them. Often during an afternoon break, the chainsaw still, and its smoke cleared, I'd sit, looking out into the sunpath on the road, with a huge blackberry patch to the right. Stealthily, ah stealthily would come the fairydiddle, up the biggest of the canes. For a while he'd just sit, reaching and munching the nearby berries. Eventually, however, the easy ones would be gone. Rather than going to all the trouble to find another cane big enough to hold his weight, he'd just start reaching further away from his center of gravity. Which meant, eventually, the inevitable: he fell so far forward, he couldn't right himself by pulling back. No problem. He just allowed himself to keep falling. Down. And around, and back up on the other side. There, blackberry in hand, he sat and feasted. Then again, and again.

I began to think of him as a clown rather than a squirrel. I was relieved later, after I'd met Michael and he told me they didn't hunt fairydiddles: because of their fondness for pine nuts (resin) they tasted a great deal like turpentine, so why waste time and energy hunting them?

Interestingly, though clearly fairydiddles can let fascination get the better of them, they are NOT suicidal: I've never seen one dead on the road. They leave those games up to the big gray squirrels. . . . who keep losing.