Alive and Revived!

Trail Wood #17.09 by Earl Plato
Dead? Teale tells us otherwise.
“ When I come up to it, I find the gray squirrel lying on its side on the grass. Its eyes are wide open. But it is rigid and unmoving. It gives every appearance of being dead. Minute follows minute without any sign of life. … it remains inert in the sunshine. At last from where I stand a little way off I see a twitch of one hind leg. Then it lifts its head and lets it fall back again. Slowly it makes a few jumps and a rest and revives from its profound state of shock. It struggles to its feet, It flips its banner tail/ t makes two or three tentative jumps. , then flattens out in the grass again. For several minutes it rests, Then another few jumps and a rest. And so by degrees it attains a tangle of bushes, then a tree. And so it disappears. It had not sustained any important physical injury. But for a half an hour after its narrow escape the high-strung animal had been in a state bordering on “catalepsy.”
Writer’s note: The white cat is not mentioned again.
One lucky squirrel, eh?