TIFU by yeeting a squirrel

I swear I didn’t mean it! I am not a fan of animal cruelty nor do I have any grudge against squirrels in general or this particular one specifically. I did however, intend to pick apples. What does this have to do with yeeting a squirrel? Well, the squirrel happened to me between me and some apples, though I didn’t actually know it at the time.

To set the scene, it’s harvest Time and the family owns an apple orchard. Now, a lot of my family members are disabled and it’s difficult to climb ladders with buckets full of pears or apples. So, we found the perfect solution. A fruit picking pole. Basically, it’s a pole that can extend up to 20 feet in length and has a basket on the end with hooks all around. Slip the basket around the apple, pull with the claws, and the fruit falls into your basket for you to lower down. You can get several at a time!

Now, the orchard grows thick in many places- it’s many decades old. The branches should be thinned, but we can’t do it right now. So, I just weave the pole between the leaves and branches, going towards the cluster of fruit that I can see about 25 feet up. I have a clear path, or so I thought. That’s when I heard the scream and saw the brown blur flying.

My first thought was that I had startled a hawk. But then, looking into the next tree, I realized the awful truth: somehow, when pushing through the branches, I had inadvertently yeeted a squirrel. Said squirrel was now screaming his head off and hissing at me.
I tried to go back to picking fruit, but every time I tried the little guy would start kissing at me and make little charging motions towards the basket. He might actually attempt in his teeny tinyness to attack me. I figure he’d had enough of me for the day, and so I packed up for another area.

Tldr: tried to pick some fruit, accidentally yeeted a squirrel.