I have a grey squirrel tail in a jam jar in the freezer, waiting for me to find the courage to paint it. It came off the road at the end of the lane, and my husband has been remarkably patient about the whole business, though he did ask whether it might live somewhere other than beside the peas.

The difficulty is the fur. Fur is the one subject where botanical training lets me down, because a petal has an edge you can commit to and fur does not, or rather it does but the edge is made of a thousand separate decisions. I have done three drawings on tracing paper and none of them convince me. I keep treating it as a silhouette instead of a structure.

I suspect the answer is to stop drawing the tail as a shape and start drawing the hairs as individual strokes, in order, from the tip backward, the way you would build a seed head. It will take an appalling length of time and I am not entirely sure it will work. There is a real possibility this squirrel ends up back in the hedge with nothing to show for it.

Anyone here paint animal specimens as well as plants. I would like to be told I am overthinking the fur, or else told plainly that I am not.