Hard Time On the Ground
By James Norton

The saddest ground squirrels I'd ever seen were part of a gang, in Indianapolis. They always seemed brave, at first, but if you looked past the switchblades and macho posturing, you could see they just wanted a handful of roasted walnuts.

I saw a squirrel kill a man once. There was no wasted energy, just a simple lazy end-over-end sommersault and the deft pull of a sharp blade. The squirrel moved with the casual precision of a window washer. He hit near the top of the man's neck, and by the time he reached the ground again, he was smoking a cigarette, and the man was dead.

"The ground is our mother," a squirrel once said to me. "We were born on the ground, we live on the ground, and we'll die on the ground. Ain't no thing."

Ah, but you could tell it was. It was obvious that it was a thing, and an important thing at that. More important than nuts, even. These were no tree squirrels, with their techno raves and big stylish pants.

Indianapolis cops asked me about the killing, but there was little I could tell them.

"He was part of the Loco Posse," I said, "and he moved like a dancer."

The cops, however, were able to tell me about the man I saw die. He'd been a biker with the Rebel Riders, an Oklahoma-based motorcycle gang. He'd been selling cystal meth to the ground squirrel community. The squirrel that killed him had reportedly been unimpressed with the buzz, but the man's associates claimed he was selling the pure stuff.

The thing is, both the squirrel and the man might have been telling the truth. These squirrels were hard.