The Squirrel Hunt (Attempt)

The Squirrel Hunt (Attempt) is one of the most revealing episodes in Nightbitch's transformation, a scene that fuses comedy, humiliation, and instinct into a single failed pounce. It occurs during a rare moment of social connection, when Nightbitch is having a picnic lunch in a park with The Working Mother, a fellow artist from her graduate program who has apparently transitioned into motherhood without difficulty. As her friend speaks about her artistic practice and her children, Nightbitch's attention is seized not by the conversation but by a bushy-tailed squirrel nibbling on trash at the edge of the woods. In that instant, the carefully maintained surface of her human sociability cracks, and her canine instincts take over completely.

The Setting and the Witness

The episode unfolds on a fine summer day, a setting that initially seems to promise ordinary domestic contentment. Nightbitch has just told The Working Mother that she does have the life—the stay-at-home life—and for the first time feels genuine gratitude, sensing a minuscule yet profound shifting of her deepest fears and dreams. This moment of tentative peace is shattered when she spots the squirrel. Her friend, taking neat bites from her sandwich and discussing her own artistic struggles, becomes irrelevant. Nightbitch freezes with animal alertness, her gaze locked on the creature. The Working Mother notices the change, wrinkling her brow into a knotted little question and asking if everything is okay, but Nightbitch is already gone, lost to the hunt.

The Hunt and the Failure

The pursuit unfolds with a mixture of predatory focus and absurd human clumsiness. Nightbitch has trained her son well; he is a very good boy who knows not to move, not to scare the prey away, and he waits for his mother's instruction. She whispers to him that he must wait for just the right moment before the pounce, and then she surges forward, launching herself with arms stretched forward and mouth open in a ferocious snarl, her son behind her shouting Raaaaar raaaaar raaaaaaaar. For a split second, the squirrel focuses into a pair of close-up terror-filled eyes, a twitchy little nose, and small little hands, and Nightbitch feels its fur in her very hands—but then the creature is gone with the swish of its tail, slipping from between her inept human fingers. She hollers Arrrrrreeeeeeeee! from the weeds, arms extended, flip-flops yards behind her, while her son howls Arrroooooooo! and throws himself down beside her, laughing. The moment ends with Nightbitch lying in the grass, turning conspiratorially to her son and declaring, We almost got him!, as the boy reaches out to touch her hair.

The Meaning of the Failed Pounce

The failed hunt is not merely a comic interlude; it is a precise dramatization of Nightbitch's liminal state. She is caught between two natures: her body still moves with human ineptitude, her fingers unable to grip the prey, her flip-flops flying off as she lunges. Yet her instincts are fully canine—the freeze, the stalk, the pounce, the snarl. The episode reveals that her transformation is not yet complete; she has the desire and the predatory drive of a dog but still inhabits a human form that cannot execute the kill. This is the same body that, in the days following her self-naming as Nightbitch, sprouted a patch of coarse black hair at the base of her neck, a physical sign she greeted with the thought, What the fuck. The hunt shows that the change is real but unfinished, a becoming rather than an arrival.

The scene also carries the weight of her accumulated rage and frustration. Nightbitch has long felt that society, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood were masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there, an idea that took on new heft after her son arrived and grew even heavier after she quit her job. She has inflated with mother-rage and composed elaborate, emotional arguments against the system, capitalism, the patriarchy, religion, gender roles, and biology. The squirrel hunt is a physical eruption of this psychic pressure, a moment when the arguments and theories collapse into pure, wordless action. It is the kind of violence she has been craving, the sensation of sinking her sharp teeth into something living and bloody, even if, in this instance, she fails to make contact.

The Witness and the Contrast

The presence of The Working Mother as witness sharpens the episode's irony. Nightbitch has grimly watched this woman from a distance on social media, posting milestones like First day of day care! and Helping Mommy with her installation, the baby strapped to her chest as she works with chicken wire in a gallery. Nightbitch has repeatedly asked herself why she cannot do that, how it can be so easy. Now, in the very moment she has begun to feel gratitude for her own life, she reveals her monstrous other self to this emblem of seamless motherhood. The hunt is a public confession of her difference, a demonstration that she cannot and will not perform the role of the composed, civilized mother. The Working Mother's knotted brow is the face of polite society confronted with the wildness it cannot contain.

The Deeper Resonance

The failed pounce also connects to Nightbitch's larger arc of self-discovery. Her desire to be a dog is rooted in the freedom it offers: to bark and snarl without justification, to run free, to be a body and instinct and urge, to revert to a pure, throbbing state. She recalls the freedom she had when giving birth, when she screamed and shat and swore and would have killed had she needed to, while her husband nearly passed out from the noises coming from her mouth. The squirrel hunt is a rehearsal of this freedom in miniature, a public performance of the animal she is becoming. It also echoes her Appalachian upbringing, the skills she gathered there—tracking an animal through the woods, knowing her cardinal directions, living inside an entire life on her own—skills that her husband, with his electronics and engineering, has rendered economically worthless even though she could make a world. The hunt is a return to that older, deeper knowledge, a reclaiming of a self that predates marriage and motherhood.

In the end, the squirrel hunt is a scene of joyful failure. Nightbitch does not catch the squirrel, but she does catch something else: a moment of pure connection with her son, who howls beside her in the weeds, and a confirmation of the wild path she is on. The episode foreshadows the more successful hunts to come, the nights when she will sink her teeth into living flesh and feel its essence drain away. But for now, she lies in the grass, flip-flops scattered, laughing with her boy, having proven to herself and to the watching world that she is no longer merely a mother—she is becoming a monster, and that monstrousness is not a wrong kind but a beautiful one.