Now the chipmunk is free to flee. But it hunkers to the ground, eyeing the boy’s feet with coiled purpose. The boy understands exactly what is about to happen: feeling cornered, the chipmunk will charge him. In a brown blur it will scurry up his shoe and latch onto his pantsleg, the way a squirrel mounts a tree trunk. As it claws at his pants for purchase, tearing through the cotton, the boy will be able to feel its bark-sharpened nails get a scansorial grip into his shinbone. The sear of skin tearing; the beading of blood. He cannot help imagining all this. He will kick out his leg—as if it were aflame, he imagines—but the chipmunk will hold fast to him, out of rabidness perhaps. Then the boy will have no choice. Above all, he knows, he will have to keep the creature from biting him. After trying so hard not to frighten it, he will be forced to kill it. With his free foot he will have to scrape it from his pantsleg, onto the sidewalk, and stomp the life out of it, flattening it as dispassionately as that car had flattened the rodent in the road. In this way, he will become everything the animal mistook him for: its murderer, its personal death. The boy stares down at the chipmunk, which has begun to vibrate like a revving engine. Because it was wrong about the boy, it will prove to be right about the boy. Because it has mistaken the boy for a murderer, it will make the boy murder it. And so perhaps, the boy reflects, the chipmunk wasn’t wrong after all: maybe it could see clearly what the boy could not. That he had a role to play in its fate. The boy stomps his foot lightly on the sidewalk. Still the chipmunk does not run. It is ready now. It must have been waiting for this moment its entire life. Seeing the boy today, it recognized him instantaneously: he was the human who had been set aside for it, the boy it had been assigned from the beginning. He was the place it was fated to die. Now, at long last, it has an appointment to keep.