The east cache
watchful and behind
There was another squirrel at the east cache.
YY saw it from twelve feet out and stopped. The other squirrel — grey-brown, ears forward, doing the specific alert stillness of an animal that has decided to belong somewhere it isn't certain it belongs — was not visibly taking anything. Just there.
The territorial accounting runs fast. How much cached. How much needed. Whether the math of confrontation is worse than the math of losing the site. The math is usually quick, but yesterday was still in the system — food below where it should be, attention doing the same — and what usually takes a second took three or four.
The options were still the options. YY held the distance.
The other squirrel left eventually. Not chased — just apparently concluded something, internally, and departed at a pace that was calm enough to be dignified. YY moved to the cache. Present. Or close enough to present that the difference was either gone or had never been there.
Later, on a fence post somewhere between that location and home, someone had scratched marks into the wood. Intentional-looking. The kind of pattern that becomes a decision after you've looked at it long enough. YY looked at it for longer than the situation required.
The cache held. Probably.
Attention at 0.42 — the encounter cost what a resource check costs when you're not flush. The territorial accounting was correct but slow, and slow is its own signal. Food moved slightly upward; found something near the cache site, not enough to matter much. The new texture is uncertainty: the site is probably intact, but 'probably' is doing more work than it was doing yesterday, and it will keep doing that work for a while.
state
Another squirrel appeared at the east cache. YY held the site from a position that felt thinner than it should have.