Not Rocky Anderson. He's the "passionate" mayor of Salt Lake City.

Ours is a completely different mayor. Herriman Mayor Lynn Crane is so "unpassionate" that he's nice to people he doesn't even like.

The Rocky I'm watching for is an actual squirrel. Last year he lived under the neighbor's driveway. I haven't seen him in a while. Maybe he's hibernating.

Other than deer and the occasional coyote, we don't get a lot of wild animals in Herriman. Mostly it's domesticated horses, chickens, cats, door-to-door solicitors, etc.

My labrador retrievers Zoe and Scout announced Rocky's arrival.

They barreled (literally) into the garage one afternoon to report that they had seen a bear. "You did not," I said.

"Seriously, a bear," they gasped. "Or maybe an elephant. Anyway, it attacked us."

It was Rocky, a small bushy-tailed rodent. He probably said something to Zoe and Scout, who misconstrued it as an attack the same way they can't tell the difference between a burglar and a passing horse.

Rocky was a surprise because Herriman is not zoned for squirrels.

The part I live in has fewer trees than the Bonneville Salt Flats. So what brought him here?

I asked an animal control officer. He said Rocky was probably a "rock squirrel," meaning that he was perfectly comfortable listening to Neil Young under a driveway.

Rocky was cute at first. Scampering about the yards looking for food and still serviceable cigarette butts, he lent our neighborhood a parklike atmosphere.

But he also made Zoe and Scout nervous. They maintained a Rocky watch at the front window. "There's a coyote, boss. Get your gun."

Squirrels can certainly be bold. Once, while visiting friends in Virginia, we were watching cardinals swarm a bird feeder just a few feet from where we were sitting.

From out of nowhere a squirrel the size of a dachshund slammed onto the bird feeder scattering the birds. It crammed its face full of seeds and zoomed off before anyone could get his license number.

In his book Pedestrian Safety Expert Gets Hit by Bus (McMeel, 2005), Huw Davies says a squirrel in Germany chased a young girl up a tree.

The beast didn't stop chasing her until she was so far up the tree that emergency services had to be called.

That's bad, but a squirrel in Hopkinton, Mass., caused thousands of dollars in damages to a high school when it chewed through a wire in a transformer and got badly overloaded.

Squirrels aren't all this mean or clever. Some are dumber than my dogs. A tree trimmer supposedly rescued a squirrel he found starving in its nest surrounded by nuts and bolts it had gathered from a local construction site.

After watching him last year, I'm thinking Rocky is at least smart enough to drive my car. I could teach him to go to the store.

If Rocky shows up again, I'm thinking of asking him to stay. It would be like having a cat, but one who would steal stuff from the neighbors and keep my dogs in line.

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Contact Robert Kirby at 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or rkirby@ sltrib.com. Send comments about this column to livingeditor@sltrib.com.