When I took Clementine out for her Morning Sniffabout, the sound of tiny scrabbling feet in the maple tree told me that we had a domestic dispute in progress.

I hadn’t seen Romeo and Juliet — the pair of red fox squirrels that live in the tree — for some time, and I was almost wondering if they had their eye on a trendier neighborhood. But apparently I was wrong, because they were there big as life, and the scratchy sound of them grabbing onto the tree for dear life meant there was a chase going on. Sure enough, one rounded the trunk with the other one close behind. But to my surprise, it was Juliet that was chasing Romeo.

(By the way, I make a lot of assumptions where these squirrels are concerned since I am not, in fact, a highly trained squirrelologist. I assume that the bigger one is the male and the smaller is the female. That’s sexist, I know, but it seems like a decent hypothesis all the same, so I’ll stick with it. )

Juliet was hot on Romeo’s tail, and boy, was she mad! Romeo started climbing down the trunk to get away, getting so low that we were eye to eye and about 15 feet apart. I’ve noticed that this is a ruse when one of them is in trouble, and it seems the same as taking your date to a restaurant to break up. The idea is to make the other one so self-conscious about the audience that they don’t make a scene.

In this case, though, it wasn’t working for him. She chased him over and up and across and back and down and over again. I stopped even pretending not to stare, because it was obvious that whatever she had on her mind was trumping any natural shyness. The only thing that made her stop was being so worn out that she needed a breather. Romeo used the opportunity to get up to a fork of the trunk that had collected a lot of helicopter seeds and have a quick snack. But the next second she was off after him again, and he had to run with a seed still in his mouth, like someone with a pencil in his mouth when his hands are full.

Well, I don’t know what Romeo had done to start all that, but I know why it started up again with vigor. You don’t ever grab a bite in the middle of a big fight.