A personal essay about a dog, the brazen squirrels in our backyard, and what remains after years of watching, waiting, chasing, and aging.
When my dog Motzie was younger, she believed squirrels were a solvable problem. They lived in the oak trees beyond the fence and moved through our yard like they owned it. Seasoned trespassers scurrying about our backyard with unchecked confidence. Motzie didn’t like this. She treated every appearance as a personal affront.
Whenever the back door would slide open, she’d launch herself onto the patio like a black-and-white projectile, her long ears flapping in the wind, nails scraping for traction. Today would be the day the rightful order of our backyard was restored.
But today was never the day and as the next day came and went, the chaotic order of our backyard continued.
On more than one occasion, a squirrel got the best of her. Nipped her in the ear and left a small split at the edge. Another day, despite her win of capturing a squirrel, it managed, in its final breath, to bite her in the face.
It was a clean chunk, one that bled more than necessary. I took her to her vet at Georgetown Veterinary. Dr. Peppard cleaned her up and dabbed some ointment on her snout and sent us home with the remainder in the tube. Through all her remaining years, the small patch of fur on her nose never returned in full. Over time, the wound would heal into the unmistakable shape of a small heart. Pink for months, then to light gray then dark.
Once home from the vet, Motzie returned to her post at the back sliding glass door. She stared out at her purported enemy who she believed to be sitting on the fence rail in the distance. It’s hard to say with squirrels if you have the right one. But my dog seemed convinced, even though the particular squirrel who’d sent her to the vet had died in the skirmish. She nevertheless stared at the squirrel on our fence railing with vengeance in her eyes as if she was counting every whisker on its face and every hair on its bushy tail.
Even as she healed, she didn’t reconsider her position in the war. She maintained surveillance. Her muscles coiled and ready. The squirrels, having lost one of their own, adjusted. They were more leery than before. But then one day, the squirrels returned to their normal trespassing ways. They came closer. Too close. They started walking right up to the back patio glass, as if studying her return. Their tails flicked. Then calm. They peered right into her eyes as she growled under her breath inside. The hair on her back bristled right up the spine.
The brazen bastards.
In the early years, our backyard felt like a battlefield with clear borders. Motzie owned what little grass managed to grow out there. She owned the hillside and the bottom. The squirrels owned the branches and the limbs and the fence railing. The line between was marked. Don’t set foot below.
But as years passed, time dulled the edges.
Her chases grew shorter. What had once been a mad dash across the yard transitioned into a short, quick burst with a dignified slowdown. The squirrels began to calculate this. They would bolt when she did, but not with the same urgency. Sometimes they would stop halfway up the fence and look back. Sometimes they didn’t even bother climbing the tree.
I remember the first noticeable shift in the ongoing battle of our backyard. A squirrel launched from our fence post onto a chair on the patio. My dog was asleep on the patio until she wasn’t. The squirrel froze as Motzie rose from her afternoon nap onto her paws. She held her stance, chest puffed out, her back straight as an arrow. Her docked tail lifted.
After a few seconds, long enough to register that neither was making the first move, my dog bent back down to the ground and plopped on her side. Her eyes closed. Her belly pushed in and out as her ribcage drew up and down. She began snoring immediately. She even whistled.
The squirrel tore off up a tree.
There was no defeat in the moment for my dog. She was snoozing. Always a win. All those years of war and territory had led to this moment.
The same scene played out again and again. Motzie would lie on the patio in the sun, chin down between her paws. Sometimes she was asleep. Sometimes she was sneakily awake. When awake, she’d just watch them now. The squirrels would move through the yard, no longer frantic and anxiety-ridden.
One squirrel even stretched out its limbs on top of the picnic table one afternoon and fell asleep while soaking up the sun’s rays. Motzie was five feet away snoozing on the cool slab of the concrete patio.
They had reached an understanding.
A truce had arrived. Fourteen years in the making.
By her fifteenth year, it became like a harmless game between my dog and the squirrels. She still gave chase occasionally, more out of habit than conviction. But it was more ceremonial than anything. A brief run. A pause. A mutual acknowledgment that no one was catching anyone anymore.
The squirrels grew bolder during this time. Was the aging predator still a predator to them or something else? They’d look for food a few feet from where she slept. They’d peek their heads up occasionally as they searched for their cache or buried a nut in the soil. The dirt covered their noses.
The squirrels moved through the yard now as if she were a landmark rather than a threat.
In the last year of her life, our backyard was no longer contested territory. It was a shared space. Motzie would nap in the shade while a squirrel dozed on the picnic table or the fence post. They existed in parallel. Two species that had spent years testing each other now backyard companions. The squirrels, it could even be said, liked her presence. When she was outside, they didn’t have to worry about a hawk swooping down for a squirrel lunch.
When my dog passed away the day after Thanksgiving in 2024, the yard felt eerily quiet and calm. It was as if the backyard itself didn’t recognize the loss at first. Its sentinel would no longer stand guard… or fall asleep on the patio.
I also learned just how many squirrels were up in the trees behind our home in Charlottesville. It wasn’t the three or four I’d normally see. There were dozens, including babies and juveniles who’d never once stepped foot in our backyard.
As the days of grief pushed forward, the squirrels kept coming. They explored a different yard than the one that had existed for the past 16 years. For weeks, they approached the patio with the same measured boldness they always had, pausing near the sliding glass door as if waiting for it to slide open and the jaws of death to exit. One sat on the stoop and stared at the glass.
Where is she?
Another dug in the same patch of dirt she used to patrol.
I caught myself watching them, half expecting the familiar burst of a black and white English springer spaniel from behind me.
Better watch out, squirrel.
But it never came.
She was gone.
After about a month, the squirrels went about their ways with a more reckless abandon. They moved differently. Less cautious. Less like they could be eaten alive at any moment. The backyard, in turn, rearranged itself around my dog’s absence. The oak tree was still there. The fence still marked the border. But the war was long over. And so now was the truce.
Nowadays the squirrels simply hang out.
There’s one I call Split Ear, a small Eastern gray squirrel with a notch torn clean through the middle of her right ear. She has claimed a chair on the patio as if it were assigned seating.
When I sit outside in the evenings, she’ll hop onto the opposite chair from me and settle there, tail like a blanket over her backside. We regard each other from a polite distance.
Does she remember my dog? Does she know her name?
Motzie.
I like to think Split Ear remembers my dog or that she carries some faint imprint of those long afternoons of watchful coexistence in her bones. This is probably projection. Still, there’s something familiar in the way she sits, alert but unhurried, as if guarding against nothing in particular.
Sometimes Split Ear will stretch out along the warm wood of the picnic table in the sun, the same way her predecessors did in Motzie’s final year of life.
The backyard is quiet.
The sliding glass door reflects only my own outline now.
For the better part of her life, my dog believed the squirrels were a problem to be solved. In the end, they became neighbors. Maybe even friends for all I know, in the limited vocabulary available to both.
They shared sun and space and a slow acceptance of coexistence.
The heart-shaped scar on her nose may have faded as she aged, the pink blending more softly into the gray and white around her muzzle. But it always remained. A reminder of a single battle in the long-running backyard war. A war neither side ultimately won.
But perhaps they did. Perhaps the truce was the victory.
I hope Motzie would feel the same way. Otherwise, she may really be annoyed about all these squirrels hanging about our patio every day.
I think she’d like Split Ear at least.
Thanks for reading. This short story was inspired by Corey Ford’s “The Road to Tinkhamtown” which was recently republished in Vol. 130, No. 2 of Field & Stream magazine. It was also inspired by a touch of sadness I’ve experienced lately missing my old pup and, as always, the plethora of squirrels in my backyard at any given moment.
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