Some people will go to any length to get attention. So, too, it appears, will some animals -- even furry little ones like gray squirrels. If you think this is simply another story about cute little animals and how they charm people, think again. This is not that kind of story.

This is the story of a single squirrel and his band of comrades bent on getting fat at any cost, no matter whose liberties they trample.

Why "Cheltenham"?

When still a child, I recall reading a Disney comic book featuring Donald Duck and his obnoxious little nephews. Seems the "kids" had brought a pet chipmunk, Cheltenham, with them on a family camping trip -- and Cheltenham immediately set upon destroying the curtains in the trailer's front window.

The subverting of hospitality graciously offered by humans -- or, in this case, by ducks -- seems to be a recurring theme in comic books. Unfortunately for me, it is also quite a real event in contemporary backyard society . . .

So it is with Cheltenham. . .

Several years after getting married my wife and I moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts, for some years quite free from Cheltenham and his wily cohorts. There were chipmunks, occasional small and spastic brown squirrels, gray foxes, deer, garden snakes, rabbits, many birds -- but no gray squirrels.

Somehow, though, perhaps 10 years after we got here, Cheltenham followed. It was definitely him: no other squirrel was ever so "bold," as my wife put it. He would find choice food and take it to our front stairs, where he'd eat it in tranquil privacy, usually on the bottom step. Our comings and goings on those same steps were hardly a concern. When we opened the door he'd give us a brief over-the-shoulder glance, a fleeting "Oh, it's you," look, and resume dining.

The Ritz-and-Skippy days were history, of course, since my wife, another peanut butter lover, hid the stuff whenever she felt I might want to recast my youth and indulge Cheltenham.

It didn't matter: the countryside near Plymouth was ripe with bountiful scrub oak and other delicacies. Cheltenham could get fat without help from me.

For one birthday my wife gave me Audubon bird books, prompting the decision to mount and stock bird feeders and evidently infuriating Cheltenham who had distinctly different ideas about how I should allocate the time I spent with nonhumans.

Out came my sister's now ancient bird feeder again, and I mounted it in front of the house suspended from the branch of a sturdy but scraggly pine tree.

That signaled the start of a war which would last at least two years. . .

Logic says that placing a squirrel-proof bird feeder atop a tall, smooth pipe would make the feeder inaccessible to even the most determined squirrels.

That's precisely what I did, carefully locating the assembly sufficiently far away from nearby trees to prevent any surreptitious jumping.

OK, so he didn't even try to jump, but he quickly figured out what was on top of the damn pole and climbed it, hanging upside-down on the feeder as usual and dining at will from the bottom food opening.

OK, squirrel, this is war.

I am NOT about to be eaten out of house and home by a voracious varmint even if I did once upon a time serve him Skippy Peanut Butter & Ritz Crackers.

I grabbed a big bottle of Vaseline from our medicine cabinet and took it outside, mumbling epithets, as my wife looked on in tepid amusement.

"Enough of this [expletive deleted]," I told myself, smearing mighty gobs of the thick, gooey stuff all over the long, thin pole. "That little [expletive deleted] is NOT going to outwit me."

I then filled the feeder with black oil sunflower seeds, his favorite, with the sole intent to spite the obnoxious, overbearing little [expletive deleted].

For several days, Cheltenham surveyed the situation, sometimes jumping on the pole and getting nowhere. Gradually the Vaseline got dirty and one morning, with a struggle, Cheltenham made it to the top, positioned himself upside-down, and stuffed himself.

"I hid the Vaseline," my wife announced, arms crossed, as I searched the house, "and you won't find it. Don't ask where it is. In fact, don't ask me anything, I'm listening to Neil Diamond." Vaseline didn't cut it anyway, I had concluded, and searched for a better alternative to the oddly appropriate sounds of Diamond's Crunchy Granola Suite.

"I never heard of that," said the owner of a nearby store after I later told him of my dilemma. "Those feeders are very popular." He suggested I buy a Cayenne Pepper powder and thoroughly mix it with the seeds. "Squirrels hate it," he declared, "and birds can't taste it."

OK, so I mixed the expensive concoction in the kitchen and promptly went into a sneezing fit. I heard a door slam upstairs, probably my wife who wanted nothing to do with any element of chemical warfare -- or was it that she grew tired of the sneezing?

I poured the concoction into the feeder, sufficiently organized (for once) that I was upwind of the stuff when a small pepper cloud headed for the woods.

I walked away proud indeed, convinced I had finally outwitted that dumb little [yet another expletive deleted].

Less than 30 minutes had passed and he was back. Evidently he loved Cayenne Pepper, since he stayed far longer than usual.

Even his friends showed up this time, eating anything he threw to the ground, and he threw a lot.

Two fifty-pound bags of black oil sunflower seeds arrived in a truck from Agway. I was determined this would not be the interminable, lifetime supply of Cheltenham's Gourmet Dinners.

If spicy seeds didn't stop him, I reasoned, then making the pole impassable was the only answer. So I grabbed PAM from the kitchen shelf and sprayed that all over the pole once I had cleaned off the dirty Vaseline.

The next day I saw Cheltenham licking the pole. He loved the taste of PAM. Even worse, when I had returned to the house with the empty PAM can my wife was waiting.

"What the Hell are you doing?" she demanded. She knew the answer long before she had ever composed the question, of course; wives are a lot like lawyers, they always know the answers before they ask the questions. "Here, I got you subscriptions to bird books, read these."

She pointed to a cover story about protecting feeders from squirrels. "Wonderful," I thought, "but these fools don't know Cheltenham."

Out again I went, this time to the pharmacy. "I want something very slippery," I told the pharmacist. I did not want to tell him why. "I want to coat something with the slipperiest stuff you've got, but I don't want poison."

He gave me a weird look. "I don't want to kill anybody, I just want no friction at all, zero resistance between two surfaces." "Aha," he said, handing me a tube of K-Y Jelly. The tube was small.

"Do you have anything bigger?"

"Most guys find one tube lasts weeks," he said meekly. "They don't know Cheltenham," I muttered, "he licked off the last stuff I coated it with."

The pharmacist gave me a really weird look. "This is all we have," he said, and he walked away quickly, mumbling softly, after leaving the tube on the counter.

I coated the pole.

For days, Cheltenham struggled to gain traction but was unsuccessful. Then it rained. A day later he was hanging upside-down on my feeder again.

"Why don't you read the damn magazines I gave you?" my wife demanded.

I did. It suggested I put some kind of baffle around the pole to act as a barrier. Here is a history of those attempts:

Finally I went to a Birdwatcher's store on Cape Cod. Bought a huge $20 steel baffle shaped like a humongous Hi-C can, but far thicker and heavier. It was all metal, no nylon, no rubber, and BIG.

I win!!! Now he sits under the feeder waiting for birds to drop seed. But he is still the fattest squirrel in the neighborhood…

Part IV: The Revenge of Cheltenham.

For years, I felt that animals were survival-centric, focused on food, self-protection, and propagating their species.

It never occurred to me that they were also into gamesmanship.

Not long ago, we bought, and I painstakingly assembled, a new gas grill and placed it on our deck. To protect it, I also bought a dark-green heavy vinyl felt-lined cover with a drawstring, capable of shielding the grill from all manner of evil things -- like rain, snow, sleet, hail, etc.

For somewhere in the neighborhood of three weeks, it served my family perfectly.

Then, late one Spring afternoon as I drove down my street preparing to turn left into my driveway, I noticed that self-absorbed little snot of a rodent stealthily making his way across the street, left to right, carefully dragging a big chunk of green vinyl with felt on the inside of it. It was twice as big as he was. I felt my teeth suddenly start grinding.

I jerked my car to a stop in the driveway, leaped out, and ran toward the house of my across-the-street neighbor, only to see that piece of shockingly familiar green vinyl with its felt lining being dragged up a tree toward a large nest of oak leaves.

Dirty little %$^&*$#@, I thought.

Then I relented, thinking hey, maybe it's not what I think it is.

So home to my deck I walked, thinking thoughts of relief and hearing "Whistle a Happy Tune" in my overworked and overwrought little brain.

Then I saw it: a hole had been eaten at deck level in my grill cover. It was big enough to stick a football through -- sideways. The drawstring looked disheveled, as if it had been chewed like the drawstring of a kid's hooded jacket.

There was a crabapple apple tree beside our deck and Cheltenham frequently used it as a route of travel to the deck, where he had long visited, foraging, then left, accomplishing nothing. I took a saw, a hammer, and a lost temper and beat the crap out of every apple tree branch sufficiently unfortunate to come within six feet of my deck, thinking that might stop the obnoxious little pest.

As I was wrestling with the tree, I had visions of Elmer Fudd struggling with Bugs Bunny, but this was real -- Cheltenham is no cartoon character. I looked into the woods behind our home muttering, "You realize, of course, Cheltenham, this means WAR...."

Alright, Cheltenham, you won this round. But I'm not through, I thought.

Evidently he thought the same thing. Fast-forward to November. It's a Saturday morning, and I'm in the kitchen with Frosted Flakes and a sliced banana thinking Tony The Tiger must be a geriatric case by now when I hear some noise on the deck. A week or so before, at night, we heard a crash there, as a racoon foraging at night climbed onto a pile of wood stored there awaiting to be installed as replacement stairs. The wood toppled and so did he.

I looked at the wood and saw it was as neatly stacked as it had been after I fixed it, just one board -- the one nearest the grill -- was out of place. Next to the wood was cheltenham, and in his grubby little mouth was the bottom edge of MY grill cover, which he had grabbed and was attempting to pull off my grill. I rapped the window, stomped my feet and yelled things my mother probably would not be proud of.

My wife came in the room. "Now what," she asked, in that hands-on-her hips mode of wifely discontent. I muttered something as I headed outside.

On the deck, he was still pulling as I stood ten feet away, teeth again grinding. I stomped my foot hard enough to give him a start and me a pedialgia.

Evidently he had taken two other chunks out of the cover that I had not previously noticed and this time, it looked like he wanted the whole enchilada.

I thought of Ed, my long-time lawyer friend with the big gun collection. Has it come to that?

When winter finally came, ice went right through the cover, welding it to the grill and rendering both the grill and its cover useless. Off it went, a victim of Cheltenham -- just like me.

Part V: The Apple Tree.

My wife has grown to hate Cheltenham, usually disparaging him as "that dirty little rodent."

Two years ago, we bought a very nice, big rope hammock that went from end to end on our deck, several feet away from the grill.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Future Episodes:

The Air Conditioner. Have you ever seen a squirrel climb up the side of a house, like spider man? Cheltenham did. And what did he do when he got to the air conditioner in my office? Obnoxious little #$%$#@!!

The Galvanized Steel Trash Can. Think snapping the lid shut on a big strong steel trash can will stop Cheltenham from opening the can? Hah. We had to buy a damn cinder block.

Bernie Strikes Terror. Is Bernie the ultimate anti-Cheltenham weapon?