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Title: The life story of a squirrel

Author: T. C. Bridges

Release Date: June 5, 2022 [eBook #68252]

Language: English

Produced by: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
             https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images
             made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE STORY OF A
SQUIRREL ***






Animal Autobiographies.

THE LIFE STORY OF A SQUIRREL

IN THE SAME SERIES

PRICE 6s. EACH

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR

    THE BLACK BEAR
    BY H. PERRY ROBINSON
    CONTAINING TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. VAN OORT

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    BY VIOLET HUNT
    CONTAINING TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ADOLPH BIRKENRUTH

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    BY G. E. MITTON
    CONTAINING TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN WILLIAMSON

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    BY J. C. TREGARTHEN
    CONTAINING TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY COUNTESS HELENA GLEICHEN

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    BY G. M. A. HEWETT
    CONTAINING TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEPHEN BAGHOT-DE-LA-BERE

PUBLISHED BY A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

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[Illustration: SCUD.]




[Illustration:

    THE LIFE STORY OF
    A SQUIRREL

    BY
    T. C. BRIDGES

    LONDON
    ADAM·&·CHARLES·BLACK
    1907]




CONTENTS


                                         PAGE

                 CHAPTER I

    MY FIRST ADVENTURE                      1

                 CHAPTER II

    THE GREAT DISASTER                     21

                CHAPTER III

    THE PLEASURES OF IMPRISONMENT          40

                 CHAPTER IV

    A DAY IN RAT LAND                      63

                 CHAPTER V

    BACK TO THE WOODLANDS                  81

                 CHAPTER VI

    A NARROW ESCAPE                        95

                CHAPTER VII

    THE GREY TERROR                       119

                CHAPTER VIII

    I FIND A WIFE                         150

                 CHAPTER IX

    WAR DECLARED AGAINST OUR RACE         174

                 CHAPTER X

    POACHERS AND A BATTUE                 192

                 CHAPTER XI

    MY LAST ADVENTURE                     210




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BY ALLAN STEWART


    SCUD                                                     _Frontispiece_

                                                                    FACING
                                                                      PAGE

    FATHER LEAPED STRAIGHT TOWARDS THE BOY, LANDING ACTUALLY ON HIS
      SHOULDER                                                          32

    HE IMITATED ME TO MY FACE                                           48

    THE WHOLE OF THE SLIMY OLD WALL SEEMED ALIVE WITH THEM              74

    THE BOYS NEVER MOVED OR SPOKE                                       88

    CLIMBING INTO ONE OF THE LARGEST TREES, WE LAY PANTING AND
      TIRED OUT                                                        112

    TWO CRUEL GREEN ORBS SET IN A WIDE GREY FACE                       142

    DOWN THE NEAR SIDE OF THE TRUNK WAS A DEEP AND WIDE NEW SCAR       172

    ‘AND TO THINK IT WAS THIS HERE LITTLE RED RASCAL’                  184

    A SMALL BLUE FLAME ILLUMINATED THREE EAGER FACES                   194

    ANOTHER MOMENT FOUND ME COMFORTABLY PERCHED IN THE BRANCHES
      OF THE HAZEL-BUSHES                                              208

    THE DOG BOUNDED HIGH, BUT I WAS SAFELY OUT OF HIS REACH            224




THE LIFE STORY OF A SQUIRREL




CHAPTER I

MY FIRST ADVENTURE


It was a perfect June morning, not a breath stirring, and the sun fairly
baking down till the whole air was full of the hot resinous scent of
pine-needles; but, warm as it was, I was shivering as I lay out on the
tip of a larch-bough and looked down. I was not giddy—a squirrel never
is. But that next bough below me, where my mother was sitting, seemed
very far away, and I could not help thinking what a tremendous fall it
would be to the ground, supposing I happened to miss my landing-place.
I am too old now to blush at the recollection of it, and I don’t mind
confessing that at the time I was in what I have since heard called a
blue funk.

The fact is, it was my first jumping and climbing lesson. Even squirrels
have to learn to climb, just as birds have to be taught by their parents
to fly.

My mother called me by my name, Scud, sitting up straight, and looking
at me encouragingly with her pretty black eyes. But I still hesitated,
crouching low on my branch and clinging tight to it with all four sets of
small sharp claws.

Mother grew a trifle impatient, and called to my brother Rusty to take my
place.

This was too much for me. I took my courage in both fore-paws, set my
teeth, and launched myself desperately into the air. I came down flat on
my little white stomach, but as at that time I weighed rather less than
four ounces, and the bough below was soft and springy, I did not knock
the wind out of myself, as one of you humans would have done if you had
fallen in the same way.

Mother gave a little snort. She did not approve of my methods, and told
me I should spread my legs wider and make more use of my tail. Then she
turned and gave a low call to Rusty to follow.

Even at that early age—we were barely a month old—Rusty was a heavier
and rather slower-going squirrel than I. But he already showed that
bull-dog courage which was so strong a trait all through his after-life.
He crawled deliberately to the very end of the branch, then simply let
go and tumbled all in a heap right on the top of us. It was extremely
lucky for him that mother was so quick as she was. She made a rapid bound
forward, and caught her blundering son by the loose skin at the back of
his neck just in time to save him from going headlong to the ground,
quite fifty feet below.

She panted with fright as she lifted him to a place of safety with a
little shake.

Rusty looked a trifle sulky, and mother gave him an affectionate pat to
soothe him down.

Then she told us to follow her back along the branch, and she would show
us how to climb up the trunk home again. She sent me first.

I had hardly reached the trunk end of the bough when I heard mother utter
a cry which I had never heard her give before. It was a low sharp call.
Oddly enough, I seemed to know exactly what it meant. At once I lay
flat upon the bough, here quite thick enough to hide my small body, and
crouched down, making myself as small as possible. At the same instant
mother seized Rusty by the scruff of his neck, and with one splendid
leap sprang right up on to the wide, thick bough on the flat surface of
which our home was built. In a few seconds she came back for me, and
before I knew what was the matter I, too, was safe in the nest, alongside
Rusty and my sister, little Hazel.

Mother gave a low note of warning that none of us should move or make any
noise; and you may be sure we all obeyed, for something in her manner
frightened us greatly. Presently we heard heavy footfalls down below
rustling in the dry pine-needles. We sat closer than ever, hardly daring
to breathe. The footsteps stopped just below our tree, and a loud rough
voice, that made every nerve in my body quiver, shouted out something.
From the sound of it we could tell that the speaker was peering right up
between the boughs into our tree, and we knew without the slightest doubt
he had discovered our drey. He must have spoken loud, even for a human,
for his companion gave a sharp ‘S-s-sh!’ as if he were afraid that some
one else might overhear and come down upon them. It could not have been
of us he was afraid, for we, poor trembling, palpitating little things,
lay huddled together, hardly daring to breathe.

The two tormentors turned away a few paces after a few lower-toned
remarks, and I began to think they had gone, when——

Crash, a great jagged lump of stone came hurtling up within a yard of our
home, frightening us all abominably.

Mother crouched with us closer than ever into our frail little house of
sticks, which was not made to stand the force of stones.

Almost immediately there fell another mass of whizzing stone, even
nearer than the first. It shore away a large tassel from the bough just
overhead, and this fell right on the top of us, frightening Hazel so much
that she jumped completely out of the nest, and, if mother had not been
after her as quick as lightning, she must have fallen over the edge and
probably tumbled right down to the ground and been killed at once. Even a
squirrel, particularly a young one, cannot fall fifty feet in safety.

Mother saved her from this fate, but the mischief was done. The quick
eyes of our enemies below had caught a glimpse of red fur among the pale
green foliage, and they roared out in triumph, the louder and noisier
making such a row, I thought that anyone within hearing must come
rushing to see what was the matter. Then they began disputing together,
perhaps as to which of them should carry us away.

We lay there nestling under mother’s thick fur, shaking with fright.

The two fellows down below argued like angry magpies for several minutes,
and at last it was decided that the quieter one should do the climbing.
I peeped over timidly and saw him throw off his coat, and drew back to
make myself as small as possible. Presently I heard a bough creak, and
then there followed a scraping and grinding as his heavy hobnailed boots
clawed the trunk in an effort to reach the first branch. Once on that,
he came up with dreadful rapidity. The boughs of the larch were so close
together that even such a great clumsy animal, with his hind-paws all
covered up with leather and iron, could climb it as easily as a ladder.
We heard him coughing and making queer noises as the thick green dust,
which always covers an old larch, got into his throat, and the little
sharp dry twigs switched his face. But he kept on steadily, and soon he
was only three or four branches below us, and making the whole top of the
tree quiver and shake with his clumsy struggles. But as he got higher the
branches were thinner, and he stopped, evidently not daring to trust his
weight to them, and called out something to his companion. All the answer
he got was a jeering laugh, and this probably decided him, for, with a
growl, he came on again. The tree really was thin up near our bough, at
least for a great giant like this. The trunk itself bent, and the shaking
was so tremendous that I began to think that our whole home would be
jerked loose from its platform and go tumbling down in ruins with us
inside it.

Suddenly the fellow’s great rough head was pushed up through the branches
just below. His fat cheeks were crimson, and his hair all plastered down
on his forehead with perspiration. I stared at him in a sort of horrible
fascination. I could not have moved for the life of me, and, as Rusty
and Hazel told me afterwards, they felt just the same. But mother kept
her head. She was sitting up straight, with her bright black eyes fairly
snapping with rage and excitement.

The man made a desperate scramble, and up came a large dirty paw and
grasped the very branch on which we lived. This was too much for mother.
Her fur fairly bristled as she made a sudden dash out of the nest by the
entrance nearest to the trunk, and went straight for that grasping fist.
Next instant her sharp teeth met deep in his first finger. He gave one
yell and let go. All his weight came on his other hand, there was a loud
snap, and his large red face disappeared with startling suddenness.

For a moment our tree felt just as it does when a strong gust of wind
catches and sways it. Our enemy, luckily for himself, had fallen upon a
wide-spreading bough not far below, had caught hold of it, and so saved
himself from a tumble right down to the bottom.

I heard his companion cry out in a frightened voice. For a moment there
was no reply, and then a torrent of language so angry that I am sure no
respectable squirrel would have used anything so bad even when talking to
a weasel.

The man who had fallen was dancing about, holding his hand in his mouth,
and taking it out to show his comrade. I watched him excitedly, hoping
that now he had been hurt he would go away; but no, picking himself up
he began again clumsily climbing up towards us. He came more slowly than
before, trying each branch carefully before he put his weight on it.
Presently I saw his furious face rising up again through the branches,
and now he had something shining and sharp, like a long tooth, clutched
between his lips. I did not know then what a knife was, but I thought
it looked particularly unpleasant. There was a nasty shine, too, in his
pale blue eyes. I could feel my heart throbbing as if it would burst.
Again his great ugly paw came clutching up at our bough. Fortunately he
could not quite reach it. Having broken off the branch just below us, he
had nothing to hold on to. However, he was so angry that there was no
stopping him. He got his arms and legs round the trunk and began to swarm
up.

It looked as if nothing could save us now. Mother herself was too
frightened of that long gleaming tooth to try to bite our enemy again.
She jumped out of the nest by the entrance on the far side, and did her
best to persuade us to follow her out to the end of the branch where we
had been having our jumping lessons. But we were much too frightened to
move. We lay shivering in the moss at the bottom of the nest, and made
ourselves as small as we knew how.

The man’s head was level with the bough; he was stretching out for a good
hand-hold, when suddenly I heard the sharp clatter of a blackbird from
the hedge at the border of the spinny, and immediately afterwards the
crash of dry twigs under a heavy boot.

A sharp hiss came from below in warning. Bill’s hand stopped in mid-air,
just as I once saw a rabbit stop at the moment the shot struck it. His
cheeks, which had been almost as red as my tail, went the colour of a
sheep’s fleece. He listened for a moment, then suddenly dropped to the
bough below, and began clambering down a good deal more quickly than he
had come up.

We guessed it was the keeper, who had always left us alone, though we had
often seen him about.

The steady tramp of his boots suddenly changed to a quick thud, thud;
and when he saw the fellows at the tree, he gave a deep roar, just like
the bull that lives in the meadow by the river when he gets angry. He
came running along at a tremendous pace, making such a tramping among
the leaves and pine-needles that the blackbird, though she had flown far
away, started up again with a louder scream than ever.

The man on the ground did not wait. Deserting his companion, he made off
at top speed. But old Crump, the keeper, knew better than to waste his
time in catching him. He had seen the boughs shaking and he came straight
for our tree, and shouted triumphantly as he caught sight of the other
one, who was by this time only a few boughs from the ground.

In his hurry and fright the fellow missed his hold. Next moment there was
a tremendous thump, and a worse row even than when he had taken his first
tumble.

I peeped out of the nest again more confidently, and I thought they were
fighting. But what had happened was that the poacher had fallen right on
the top of Crump’s head, flooring him completely, and, I should think,
knocking all the breath out of him. Then, before the keeper, who was as
fat as a dormouse, could gain his feet, the other had picked himself up
and gone off full tilt after his friend.

The keeper growled and muttered to himself as he rose slowly. He picked
up his gun and walked round the tree, looking up, evidently puzzled as to
what the men had been after. Then he caught sight of us, and shook his
head, as if he would have much liked to capture us himself He certainly
could not have had any friendly feeling for us, as we bit the tips off
his young larches. But he must have had orders to let us alone, for he
did not attempt to molest us, and presently, to our great relief, he too
stumped off and left us undisturbed.

We lay very still for a long time, slowly getting over our fright.
Suddenly mother gave a pleased little squeak and jumped out of the nest.
I crawled out too, as boldly as you please, and looked down. Here came
father running along over the thick brown carpet of pine-needles which
covered the ground. I know some of you humans laugh at a squirrel on the
ground. But it is not our fault that we do not look so well there as in
our proper place—a tree. Why, even the swan, supposed to be the most
graceful thing in the world, waddles in the clumsiest fashion imaginable
when it is on dry land! At any rate, even over flat ground a squirrel can
move at a good pace.

Father was lopping along with his fore-paws very wide apart, and stopping
now and then to sniff or burrow a little among the pine and larch
needles. In one place he evidently found something good—possibly a nice
fat grub—for he stopped, sat up on his hind-legs, and, holding whatever
it was in his fore-paws, began to nibble at it daintily. How handsome he
looked sitting there, with his beautiful sharp ears cocked, his splendid
brush hoisted straight up, and the rich, ruddy fur of his back just
touched by a stray gleam of sunshine, contrasting beautifully with the
snowy whiteness of his waistcoat! It has always been my opinion that he
was the handsomest squirrel I ever saw, and I was never more pleased in
my life than when mother once told me that she thought I was more like
him than any of her other children.

Mother called again. Father looked up, caught sight of her, gave a quick
flick of his tail and an answering call. Next instant we heard the rattle
of his claws on the rough bark, and almost before I could look round here
he was with us.

He was full of good-humour, for he had been over to the beech copse, and
the mast, he told us, was the finest crop he had seen for years. We must
collect a good store as soon as it got ripe.

But he suddenly noticed that mother was quivering all over, and he had
not time to ask what had upset her before she burst into an account of
all the dreadful things that had happened that morning.

Then he looked very grave.

‘We must go,’ he said. ‘It means building a new house. And this tree has
suited us so admirably. I do not think that I have ever seen a weasel
near it; then, too, we are so capitally sheltered from bad weather by
all these thick evergreens. In any case I shall not leave the plantation,
but I suppose we must look out for another tree. We cannot do anything
to-day; it is too late. Now I will mount guard over the youngsters while
you go and get some dinner.’

And rather uneasily she went off.

The heat of the day was over, but the sun was still warm. A little breeze
was talking gently up in the murmurous tops of the trees, causing the
shadows to sway and dance in dappled lights on the lower branches. You
humans, who never go anywhere without stamping, and running, and talking
loudly, and lighting pipes with crackly matches, have no idea what the
real life of the woods is like, especially on a fine June afternoon such
as this one was. Though our larch was one of a thick clump, yet from the
great height of our nest we could see right across into the belt of oaks,
beeches, and old thorn-trees which lay along the slope below, and could
even catch a glimpse of the tall hedge and bank, and of the sandy turf
beyond where the rabbit-warren lay.

One by one the rabbits lopped silently out of their burrows and began to
feed till the close turf was almost as brown as green. Stupid fellows,
rabbits, I always think, but I like to watch them, especially when the
young ones play, jumping over and over one another, or when some old
buck, with a sudden idea that a fox or weasel is on the prowl, whacks the
ground with one hind-leg, and then all scuttle helter-skelter back into
their holes.

A pompous old cock pheasant came strutting down a ride in the young
bracken, the sun shining full on his glossy plumage and black-barred
tail. Presently his wife followed him, and behind her came a dozen chicks
flitting noiselessly over the ground like so many small brown shadows.
A pair of wood-pigeons were raising their second brood in a fir-tree,
not far away from where we lived, and every now and then, with a rapid
clatter of wings, one of the old birds came flapping through the aisles
of the plantation with food for their two ugly, half-fledged young ones.
I wonder, by the by, why a wood-pigeon is so amazingly careless about
its nest building. I never can understand how it is that the young ones
do not fall off the rough platform of sticks which is their apology for
a nest. And it must be shockingly cold and draughty, too. Birds are
supposed to be ahead of all other nest-builders, but I can tell you there
are a good many besides the wood-pigeon who might take a few pointers in
architecture from us squirrels, to say nothing of our distant cousin the
door-mouse.

A sharp rat-a-tat just behind startled me, and there was a big green
woodpecker hanging on tight against the trunk of our own larch with his
strong claws, and pounding the bark with his hammer-like beak. Father
looked at him with interest.

‘Ah,’ he observed, ‘it’s about time we did move. The old tree must be
getting rotten, or we shouldn’t have a visit from him.’

It was all most pleasant and peaceful as we sat there—Rusty, Hazel, and
I—enjoying the gentle swinging in the soft west wind, and waiting for
mother to come home.

It was a very fine summer, that one. I have never seen one like it since.
We had very little rain and no storms for weeks on end, and the crops of
mast and nuts were splendid.

But I am running ahead too fast. The very next day after our narrow
escape from the two loafers, father set to work to make a new house in
the fir-tree he had spoken of. Luckily for him, there was an old carrion
crow’s nest handy in the top branches, and he got plenty of sticks out
of this for the framework. Mother helped him to gather some moss—nice
dry stuff from the roots of a beech, and he made a tidy job of it within
three days. Of course, he did not build so elaborately as if he had been
constructing a winter nest—we squirrels never do. But all the same, he
put a good water-tight roof over it.

Meantime mother had been keeping us youngsters hard at work with our
climbing and jumping lessons. We all got on very well, and the day before
we were to move she actually let me come down to the ground. It was the
funniest feeling coming down so low, and at first I cannot say that I
liked it. There was no spring in the earth, and one did not seem able
to get a good hold for one’s claws. The pine-needles slipped away when
one tried to jump. However, after the first novelty wore off, I enjoyed
the new sensation hugely, and my joy was complete when mother showed me
a little fat brown beetle which she said I might eat. I tried it, and
really it might have been a nut, it was so crisp and plump.

Rusty and Hazel were sitting on a bough overhead, and as full of envy as
ever they could be, for mother had said that she really could not have
more than one of us at a time down among the dangers of the ground, and
that I was the only one quick enough to look after myself if anything
happened.

My quickness was fated to be tested. While mother was scratching about
the tree-roots, having a hunt for any stray nuts of last autumn’s store
that might hitherto have been overlooked, I moved off to see if I could
not discover another of those tasty beetles. At a little distance lay a
great log, the slowly-rotting remains of a tall tree that had been torn
up by the roots in some winter gale many years before, and was now half
buried in the ground. On its far side was a perfect thicket of bracken,
and a great bramble grew in the hollow where the roots of the tree had
once been, and hid the fast decaying trunk. There was a curious earthy
smell about the place which somehow attracted me. I know now that it
was from a sort of fungus which grows in the rotten wood, and is quite
good to eat, but at that time I was still too young to understand this.
However, I went gaily grubbing about, and at last ventured on the very
top of the log and pattered down it towards the trunk end. Near the butt
was a hollow in the worm-eaten wood. The bramble was thick on all sides,
but there was an opening above through which a patch of bright sunlight
leaked down. In the middle of this dry, warm cavity was a small coil
of something of almost the same colour as the wood on which it lay. At
first I took it for a twisted stick, but it attracted me strangely, and
I gradually moved nearer. It was not until I came to the very edge of
the hollow and sat up on my hind-legs that I suddenly became aware that
the odd coil had a little diamond-shaped head, in which were set two
beady eyes. There was a horrible cold, cruel look in those unwinking eyes
which had a strange effect upon me. I turned cold and stiff, and felt as
if, for the very life of me, I could not move. Suddenly a forked tongue
flickered out, the dead coil took life, I saw the muscles ripple below
the ashen skin. It was that movement which saved me. As the horrid head
flashed forward, I leaped high into the air. The narrow head and two
thin, keen fangs gleaming white passed less than my own length below me,
and I fell into the thick of the bramble, the worst scared squirrel in
the wood. How I scrambled out I have no idea, but in another instant I
was scuttling back to my mother, full of my direful tale.

When I told her what had happened she looked very grave.

‘It was an adder,’ she said, shivering. ‘If it had bitten you, you would
have been dead before sunset. Keep close to me, Scud.’

The next day we moved into our new quarters in the fir-tree. Personally,
I never liked a fir so well as most other trees. It is so dark and
gloomy, and you get so little sun. My own preference has always been
for a beech. An old beech has such delightful nooks and crannies, and
often deep holes, sometimes deep and large enough to build a winter home
in—always capital for the storage of nuts. There was no doubt, however,
that the fir which father had chosen had many points to recommend it.
It was an immensely tall tree, and thick as a hedge, yet there were no
branches close to the ground to tempt evil-minded young humans like our
recent invaders to climb up. What was still better, so cunningly had
father chosen his site that it was quite impossible for any evil-minded,
two-legged creatures to see us from below. Our nest was founded on a
large, flat-topped branch close in to the thick red trunk, and only about
two-thirds of the way up to the top. Another branch almost equally thick
formed a roof over our heads, so that we were very snug and comfortable.




CHAPTER II

THE GREAT DISASTER


The day on which the great disaster befell us was wet in the early
morning, and when the sun rose a thick, soft mist, white like
cotton-wool, hung over the country-side. Not a breath of air was
stirring, and it was so intensely still that it seemed as though one
could hear everything that moved from one end of the wood to the other.
The plop of a water-rat diving into a pool in the stream on the far side
of the coppice came as clearly to my ears as though the water had been
at the bottom of our own tree instead of several hundred yards away, and
when the wood-pigeons began to move unseen in the smother, the clatter of
their wings was positively startling.

We squirrel folk are not fond of wet, so we lay still and snug in our
cosy retreat until the sun began to eat up the mist. Soon the grey
smother thinned and sank, leaving the tree-tops bathed in brilliant
light, every twig dripping with moisture, and every drop sparkling
with intense brilliance. Then we crept out one by one, and, sitting up
straight upon our haunches, began our morning toilet. No other woodland
creature is so careful and tidy in its habits as a squirrel, and mother
had already thoroughly instructed us in the proper methods of using our
paws as brushes and our tongues as sponges, and in making ourselves neat
and smart as self-respecting, healthy squirrels should be.

Suddenly a peal of distant bells came clanging through the moist, calm
air with such a vibrating note that they made us all start. Father sat up
sharply, and mother asked him what was the matter.

He explained to us that he had learnt by experience that when those bells
rang out it was a dangerous time for us, for all the mischievous boys and
rough fellows in the neighbourhood seemed to appear in the woods, and the
keeper was never seen. He did not know why this should be, but from long
custom he had grown to be uneasy at the sound.

Mother shuddered sympathetically, and rubbed against him caressingly,
with a movement that told him not to worry, and she reminded him
consolingly that even if our tormentors did take it into their heads
to come into the wood they would not be likely to find us, since we had
moved.

But father, instead of responding, suddenly pricked up his ears, and,
signalling to us to be quiet, listened eagerly to some sound which the
rest of us had not yet caught. For a moment he sat up straight, as still
as though stuffed; then he turned and spoke sharply, with a warning sound
that told us to lie as still as mice, for some danger was approaching.

Sure enough, a minute later we all heard the warning cry of a frightened
blackbird, and immediately afterwards the brushing and trampling of a
number of heavy boots through the wet grass and fern in the distance. At
once we all stretched ourselves out tight as bark along the flat bough
which formed the foundation of our nest, and lay there still as so many
sleeping dormice.

The steps came rapidly nearer, and soon voices sounded plainly through
the hush of the quiet wood. Imagine how I shuddered when I recognized the
coarse tones of our former enemies mixed with others equally harsh and
unpleasant! They were making straight for our part of the wood.

Shaking though I was in every limb, curiosity drove me to peep cautiously
over the edge of the bough. The mist was all gone now, and there, below
the tall larch-tree which had been our old home and the scene of our
recent narrow escape, stood four young louts, our old enemies and two
others about the same size and age, all craning their necks and staring
upwards through the thick, pale-green branches. Each was carrying in his
right hand a short, flexible stick with a heavy head. These were not long
enough for walking-sticks, such as Crump, the keeper, and other humans
who sometimes came through the wood carried; and, in spite of my fright,
I wondered greatly what they were for. Alas! it was not long before I
learnt the terrible powers of the cruel ‘squailer.’

After a good deal of argument and dispute one of the new-comers swung
himself up on to the lowest bough. He climbed far better and faster than
the one who had tried before, and in a very short time had reached a
bough close below our old drey.

By this time I was getting over my fright a little. I turned to Rusty,
who was next me.

‘What a sell for them when they find no one at home!’ I whispered in his
ear.

But Rusty only grunted, and a sharp signal for silence came from father.

The bough which had been broken before stopped the climber for a few
moments, but presently he managed to swarm up the trunk and seat himself
astride of the very branch upon which our former home was founded.

They shouted to him from below to be careful. The fellow in the tree paid
no heed, but, clutching the trunk with one hand to steady himself, boldly
thrust the other into the nest. There was a sharp exclamation of disgust;
and he cried out furiously that there was nothing there.

They were all in great excitement, and kept urging him to look further
and to make sure we weren’t hiding. He felt in every crevice of the nest,
and peered about in the boughs, and then, having evidently made up his
mind we had really gone, prepared to descend.

But the others called to him to look again, so, steadying himself once
more upon the bough, he peered upward. Then he solemnly declared, shaking
his head, that there was nothing in the tree. To prove it, with a sweep
of his great red paw, he carelessly ripped our old home from its perch
and sent it tumbling to the ground. I heard mother give a little gasp as
she saw destroyed in an instant the results of so many hours of careful
and loving toil; but my own thoughts and eyes were so concentrated upon
the invader of our rightful domain that I am afraid I hardly considered
her injured feelings. Still they would not allow him to come down; and
now came in a very real danger. From the ground it would have been quite
impossible for them to spy us out in our new quarters, but up the tree
this fellow was on a level with us, and had only to get a clear look
between the boughs to spy our little red bodies, which, however much we
crouched together, made a considerable ball of fur.

Climbing to his feet, he stood upright on the bough, clinging with one
arm to the trunk. It was this movement which proved our undoing. Standing
thus, his head was clear of the dwindling foliage near the spire-like
summit of the larch, and from his lofty perch his eye commanded the
tree-tops in the neighbourhood. A moment later his gaze fell upon us,
five small scared balls of red fur, and his roar of triumph struck terror
to our quaking hearts.

Without paying the slightest attention to the shouted questions of his
friends below, he swung himself down hand over hand, and in a very
short time had dropped to the ground, and was running across towards our
fir-tree, with the others yelping at his heels like a pack of harriers
after a hare.

Mother and father exchanged a few hurried words, but what they said I
in my excitement had not the faintest idea. Next moment father had me
by the scruff of the neck, and darted away up into the thick and almost
impenetrable top of the giant fir. Mother, with Hazel between her teeth,
came after him like a flash.

The fir-trunk forked near the summit; it was to this point that father
carried me, and dropped me in the niche between the two boughs. Instantly
he was off again to fetch Rusty. Before our enemies had noticed what was
happening, and while they were still arguing as to which of them should
do the climbing, all we three youngsters had been deposited together in
our lofty refuge.

A scuffling noise and the sound of heavy breathing came from below. One
of the gang had begun the ascent of the tree. Mother looked at father in
a sort of dumb agony. She was palpitating with fright, and her dark eyes
were large and brilliant with terror.

‘Can we reach another tree, Redskin?’ she asked tremblingly.

But father knew better, and signified, ‘No.’ They two might have done it
themselves, but carrying us the jump would be too long to risk.

From far below the bumping, scuffling noise slowly grew louder and
nearer. It was a long way up to the first bough of the fir-tree, and
the climber—it was the same one again—was obliged to swarm the scaly
red trunk. We could not, of course, see anything of him, for the matted
tangle of crooked branches below, with their foliage of thick, dark green
needles, formed an impenetrable screen.

I cannot even now remember that long wait in the sunny tree-top, while
ever from below the unseen danger crept upon us, without an unpleasant
thrill, and I know that both my brother and my sister shared my feelings.
The worst part of it all was the sight of the terror of our father, who
had always been to us a pattern of bravery. The fact was that he realized
the position, which we younger ones did not do fully. He was only too
well aware that we were trapped. He and mother might have easily escaped
by descending to the longer branches below, and thence jumping into a
spruce which grew close by; but they would not desert us, and both
remained clinging tightly to the main trunk just beside us.

The hollow in which my brother and sister and I were placed gave us
complete shelter from below, but there was only just room for the three
of us. Father and mother were forced to expose themselves. The fir was,
as I have said before, a very large tree—quite seventy feet high—old,
thick, and gnarled, and the boughs were of considerable thickness near to
its very summit. Father no doubt understood that our bulky enemy would,
if he had the pluck, be able to pursue us right up to our lofty perch,
and was aware of our almost hopeless position.

Slowly, very slowly, our persecutor came upwards. The branches, once
he was among them, were so close and thick that he evidently found it
difficult to force his way between them. Every now and then he would stop
and puff and blow; then the creaking of large boughs and the cracking of
small twigs announced a fresh effort on his part.

At last he was only separated from our second nest by a very small
interval. Yet he had not discovered it was empty. The others kept yelling
out questions to him, but he made no reply, only forced his way through
the tree, which, I am bound to say, was very thick indeed.

More scrambling. Then he caught sight of the nest and redoubled his
efforts. But when he was nearly up to it he reached up his arm, and
without the slightest fear that he might be bitten as his companion had
been, thrust his huge hand into it. The result was a savage exclamation.
Angrily he seized the empty nest, tore it out, and sent it flying down as
he had done the other.

By this time the others were a little tired of waiting, and began to
scatter out from the tree to try to spy us themselves. Common sense must
have told them that we had only left the nest when we heard them, and
could not be far, and that we could probably be seen somewhere in the
surrounding boughs. A few moments’ suspense, and then the awful warning
shout again told us we were discovered. The man was still in the tree,
though some way below, and by pointing and gesticulations they directed
him where to go to find us. So he came panting up again, the thinner
branches swaying and rustling beneath his weight. After a very few
moments his head appeared in the greenery below. He was of a different
type from the others, taller, black-haired, and sallow-faced. It did not
take him many seconds to see us, and he quickly pulled himself up towards
us.

With his eyes fixed on mother, he came rapidly upwards. Mother crouched
where she was on a small branch, very close to the extreme summit of the
tree, watching our enemy’s every movement. By a lucky chance the main
stem hid us three youngsters from his sight. I think that father and
mother must have purposely placed themselves on the other side from us
with the express object of drawing the boy’s attention away from their
helpless babies.

When he drew near he paused, and pulling a red cotton handkerchief from
his pocket, deliberately wrapped it round one hand. Then, getting a good
grip with the other, he edged outwards and made a sudden rapid grasp at
mother. My heart almost stopped as I saw the great hand extended. But
quick as he was, no human can hope to rival the lightning action of a
squirrel’s muscles, and before the grasping hand touched her the little
lithe red body flew into the air as though driven by a spring, and,
flashing downwards, landed fully twenty feet below, and disappeared into
the thickest part of the tree.

With a violent exclamation the tormentor turned his attention to father,
who was only a foot or two further away, and crouching on the extreme
outer end of a bough. Evidently he intended to make sure of him, for
he worked himself round so as to get between father and the tree, and
managed it so well that he seemed to me to have cut off all chance of
escape. I think he must have actually touched father’s tail, when the
most unexpected thing happened. Instead of jumping outwards, which, as
the bough tip projected a good way, would in all probability have ended
in a fall to the ground, into the very hands of the three watchers below,
father leaped straight towards the boy, landing actually on his shoulder.
This startled him so much that he very nearly let go altogether, and if
I had not been in such a panic I could have laughed at his fright. Then,
before the boy could recover himself, another quick bound, and father was
out on another branch, ten feet away, quite out of reach of his would-be
captor.

[Illustration: FATHER LEAPED STRAIGHT TOWARDS THE BOY LANDING ACTUALLY ON
HIS SHOULDER]

A torrent of language worse than any magpie’s burst from the fellow’s
lips, as he turned and scrambled after father again. He might as well
have tried to catch a will-o’-the-wisp. Every time he got near enough
to make a snatch, father would make another nimble jump, all the time
artfully luring his pursuer lower down the tree and away from our
hiding-place.

The game went on for a good ten minutes, and by the end of that time the
enemy was dripping with perspiration and speechless with fury. His rage
was increased by the jeers of his friends below. At last he gave it up,
having made up his mind it was not much of a game to be made a fool of by
a squirrel and mocked by the onlookers.

He dropped quickly from bough to bough, and presently I heard his heavy
boots thud on the ground. But before he had reached the foot of the tree,
both our parents were back with us. Then the sound of loud wrangling came
up to us. Surely now they would go; but no! we were not safe yet.

There was further talk, and then the whole four spread out in a circle
round the fir-tree. Presently, with a loud whizzing sound, some heavy
object came hurtling up past us. It struck a twig near the summit of the
tree and clipped it like a bullet. Thud! Another struck the main stem
just below us with a force that sent the bark flying in a shower. Then
we saw what those lead-weighted canes were for.

A third squailer passed only a few inches above father’s head. He called
to mother:

‘They’ll kill us if we stop here. Come along; take Hazel and follow me.’

In an instant he had snatched me up and was scuttling down the trunk. It
was wonderful how exactly he knew which branch-end stretched furthest
towards the spruce which was our next neighbour. Out along it he ran, and
using the natural spring of the bough to help him, made a gallant leap
outwards and downwards, legs and tail wide spread to assist him in his
flight.

The air hissed past my ears, and then with a little thud we landed safely
in the spruce. But his gallant jump had been seen by those greedy eyes,
and excited shouts came from below.

Then—ah, even now I can hardly bear to speak of it! As father was in the
very act of running up the branch towards the thick centre of the tree
and comparative safety, there came a cruel thud, and he and I together
were whirling through the air.

Crash! we came to the ground with a shock that knocked my small senses
out of me, and before I could pick myself up a hard hand had closed over
me. I turned and, with the instinct of despair, fixed my teeth deep in a
horny finger. There was a yell, and I was again flung to the ground with
a force that almost killed me. I knew no more for many minutes, and when
I woke again to stunned and aching misery, I was lying helpless in a sort
of bag, which smelt horribly of something which I now know to have been
tobacco. The bag was being shaken up and down with a steady swing; but
I, almost beside myself with pain and flight, did not attempt to move or
free myself.

Suddenly the motion stopped abruptly, and the hand was poked cautiously
into the bag. It was carefully protected this time by a handkerchief, but
I had no longer spirit left to bite. Out I was pulled and held up before
the gaze of all the four robbers, who were seated at ease on a mossy bank
on the outer side of the hedge close by the gate of our coppice. The
very first thing that my eyes fell upon was the body of my poor father
lying limp upon the bank, his white waistcoat dabbled with crimson stains
and his brilliant black eyes closed in death. I felt a cold shiver run
through me, and the stupor of despair clutched my beating heart. I hardly
even had strength left to wonder what had become of my dear mother and
my brother and sister.

They passed me from one coarse hot hand to another, and their voices grew
louder and louder as they disputed who should have possession of me.

They then went on to blows, when suddenly the quarrel was brought to an
abrupt end in a most startling fashion.

Leaping over the hedge out of the coppice behind came two tall,
smart-looking boys, a startling contrast to the four loutish hobbledehoys
around poor little me.

One of them, pointing at me, demanded in a ringing voice where they had
got me from.

Three of the four cads stood sheepishly regarding the new-comers, and
said never a word; but the one who had climbed the tree faced them boldly
enough, answering impudently.

The new-comer strode up to him. He was evidently master here, and the
others were trespassing, and they knew it, for they slunk back. Yet, in
reply to his reiterated commands, the lout who was boldest snatched me
up and refused to part with me. He was so big and strong that he seemed
a giant, and I felt I should die there and then. I closed my eyes and
gave myself up, but in a minute I was down on the bank once more, and
the two—the new-comer and the great rough fellow—were fighting hard, with
coats off and red faces.

The sound of the blows that followed, the tramping of feet, the hard
breathing of the combatants, nearly deprived me of the few senses that
remained to me, and I noticed little of the details of the fight—only
it seemed to last a long time, and once I saw the schoolboy flat on his
back. But he was up almost as soon as down, and they were at it again
hammer and tongs.

The giant made a rush head down, like a bull, but the other jumped back,
and there followed a rattle of blows as my champion’s fists got home on
the lout’s hard head. But the squire’s son did not wholly escape. The
huge fist that had grasped me so roughly caught him on the right cheek
and drove him back.

One of my champion’s eyes was closing, his right cheek was turning livid,
and there was blood on his broad white collar when they faced one another
again. But the ruffian for his part, though not so badly marked, was
breathing like a fat pug dog and seemed unsteady on his legs. To do the
fellow justice, he had pluck, for he wasted no time in making a last
attempt to rush his opponent. For a few moments it was all that the other
could do to guard his head against the swinging fists. Then—it was all so
quick that one could hardly see what happened—there was a crack like the
sound two rams make when they charge one another, and the giant tottered
for a moment, his arms waving wildly, then fell like a log and lay quite
still.

The other new-comer counted loud and slowly ‘One—two—three—four’—up to
ten. But the fellow on the ground did not move.

‘That’s the finish,’ he said.

He turned to where I lay, with hardly a breath in me, a little limp body,
and picking me up, handled me tenderly.

Terrified as I was, the change was grateful to my miserable, aching
little body. He offered me to the victor in the fight, who had by this
time got into his coat again, but he declined.

‘Put him in your pocket, Harry,’ he said to his brother. ‘My hands are
too hot to hold him.’

He was quite right. Let me here give a word of advice to all those humans
who keep any of my race as pets. Don’t hold us in your hands. In the
first place, it frightens us desperately, and in the second, it is bad
for us. A squirrel rarely lives long in captivity if he is constantly
handled. I speak from experience, and I can assure you that, much as I
grew to love my dear master and my other human friends, I was never happy
in their hands, though I never minded being kept in their pockets.

Harry put me carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was dark
and warm, and, utterly exhausted, I curled up and lay quiet, and so I was
carried away and left the home of my babyhood. It was long before I saw
it again.




CHAPTER III

THE PLEASURES OF IMPRISONMENT


I was aroused from a sort of stupor between sleep and exhaustion by being
picked out of my snug retreat and held up for inspection before a third
person, a sweet-faced lady, whom I afterwards came to know well and love
as the mother of my dear master, Jack Fortescue, and his brother Harry.

She looked at me pitifully when her son had quickly explained the events
of the morning. Her fingers were long and slim and cool, and, poor limp
little rag that I was, I never offered the slightest resistance to her
gentle grasp. She took me straight through a side door into a long,
low, shady building with wood-lined walls, and in a minute or two I was
placed in a nest of soft hay in a good-sized box covered in front with
close wire-netting. Too worn out to trouble my head about the amazing and
perplexing change in my circumstances, I simply curled up with my tail
over my nose and went sound asleep.

It was Jack who woke me. I must have been asleep for a long time, for
now the sun was pouring in through the western windows. The first thing
I realized was that I was desperately hungry, and that the little saucer
which the boy had pushed gently into the cage had a most appetizing
odour. But my sleep had given me fresh life and strength, and quiet as
his movements were, I remember that I was desperately frightened, and
cowered down, shivering, burrowing close in the hay.

Jack seemed to understand perfectly, for he closed the door again very
softly and moved away. Presently the silence restored my confidence a
little, and I ventured to peep out. The saucer was quite close to my
nose, and, hunger overpowering my fright, I crawled up and tasted the
mixture. It was bread and milk, soft and well cooked. I finished it very
rapidly, and then, feeling much refreshed, went to sleep for a second
time.

Once again before dark Jack came and fed me, and this time brought me a
couple of ready cracked nuts, as well as the bread and milk.

Well fed and cared for as I was, I shall never forget the misery of that
first night. I don’t suppose that at that very early age I actually
remembered much of what had happened during the past eventful day. What
I did feel was a sort of horror of loneliness. Instead of the whole five
of us snuggling warmly together in our well-lined drey, I was here in
this box, which was many times larger than our nest, absolutely alone.
Every time I went to sleep I would wake up again with a start, vaguely
feeling round for my mother and the rest, and shivering miserably in my
unaccustomed solitude.

At last morning came, and it was hardly broad daylight before Jack
arrived in his nightshirt and carried me off, cage and all, to his
bedroom, where he put me on the window-ledge in the sun and offered me
nuts. At first I was much alarmed; but he was so gentle that I gradually
got over my terror, and sat up and nibbled the nuts fairly happily.

I will pass over the next few days. My new master fed me assiduously,
and very soon I lost all fear of him, and the minute I saw him would
make for the door of my comfortable little prison, and wait eagerly
for the dainties which were sure to be forthcoming. Every morning he
changed my bed and gave me fresh hay, which makes far the best bedding
for any of our tribe. During the day my cage was brought down into the
bowling-alley, where several other pets were kept, and at night Jack
took me up to his room, so that I might not be frightened by servants
dusting in the morning.

At last there came a morning when Jack’s hand, instead of offering me
the usual nut, gently grasped me. Frightened, I turned at once and bit
him sharply. I don’t suppose my small teeth did much damage, for he only
laughed, and, lifting me right out of the cage, placed me on his bed. The
white counterpane was so very different from anything which I had ever
felt under my claws before, that at first I was too much surprised to
move, and remained perfectly still. Presently, however, Jack popped a nut
down in front of me. That, at any rate, I understood, so I sat up on my
hind-quarters, cracked it, and, first carefully removing the brown skin
from the kernel, made short work of the dainty.

Hoping for more, I gained confidence and proceeded to explore. First I
caught my claws in the little projecting tufts of the counterpane, and
heard Jack laughing gently as I shook myself impatiently free, giving a
little squeak of disgust. Presently I discovered a cavity that looked
dark and inviting. You know a squirrel’s besetting sin is curiosity. He
always wants to know the ins and outs of everything. Any object which he
has not seen before fascinates him, and I am afraid to say how many of
my friends have paid for their inquisitiveness by getting into serious
trouble. So I crawled down, and finding it delightfully warm and dark,
made my way under the clothes to the very foot of the bed, where, as I
was very comfortable, I went sound asleep.

On the next morning my master turned me loose again, this time on the
floor, and after a fresh access of timidity I again found nuts. There
were more than I wanted, so, obeying a natural instinct, I ate what I
could, and hid the rest in various convenient receptacles.

Soon I began to look forward to my daily outing, and took great delight
in exploring every corner of the room. I well recollect what a shock
I got the first time I reached the window-sill. Outside was a great
elm-tree, whose branches reached within a few yards of the window, and
the sight of the green leaves waving gently in the early morning breeze
roused in me strange longings. I made one jump, and striking full against
the glass, fell back half stunned and terrified almost out of my wits at
the strange transparent barrier. Jack picked me up at once, and placed me
safe in the darkness and warmth under the bedclothes, where I had time
to recover from my fright.

Soon he took to letting me out at bedtime, and I had a grand scamper
before the light was put out. The window-curtains were my favourite
resort. They were so easy to climb, and had such splendid folds and
crannies for hiding nuts in. I would race across the curtain-pole,
rattling the rings as I went, down the other curtain, round the room full
tilt, and finish up with a good hunt in all the corners for nuts which
I had concealed the day before and forgotten all about. I rarely went
back to my cage to sleep, though it was always open and ready for me. A
fold in the window-curtain was my usual place of repose, and another pet
perch was an old band-box on the top of the wardrobe. It was half full of
tissue paper, which possessed a strange fascination for my young mind. I
tore it all up fine with my sharp teeth, and made a most delicious nest
with the bits.

When the night was chilly I generally snuggled under Jack’s bedclothes,
and always, first thing in the morning, so soon as daylight came, I would
make for the bed, and working my way gently down between the sheets, curl
up close against Jack’s toes. Sometimes he was so sleepy that he would
not wake up and play when I wanted him to; then I would emerge on to the
pillow and gently nibble the tip of his nose.

This never failed. ‘Confound you, Nipper!’ (he always called me Nipper),
he would mutter drowsily, and then make a lazy grab, which I always
eluded with the greatest ease, and with two bounds would land on the end
of the bedstead, and, perched there, scold him until he sat up and threw
a sock at me.

He was never rough, and never lost his temper with me, although I am sure
that I was aggravating enough at times. It must have been trying when he
pulled on his boots in a hurry and found a couple of nuts wedged tight
in each toe. I do not think that a boy and a squirrel ever became better
chums. We were simply devoted to one another. The only dull times for me
were when Jack and Harry were busy with their tutor, during which hours I
was usually in my box in the bowling-alley.

There, as I think I mentioned before, the Fortescue boys kept several
other pets. There was a large white cockatoo with a lemon crest, named
Joey, which frightened and puzzled me horribly until I came to understand
its odd faculty of imitating every person and animal about the place. It
would ‘miaouw’ like a cat, a most disturbing sound, for every squirrel
hates cats next to hawks and weasels; would bark so realistically that
Mrs. Fortescue’s white Pomeranian was always stirred up to reply, and
the two would go on and on, the wily old bird always starting up afresh
whenever the dog stopped, until poor Pom nearly had a fit and grew
quite hoarse. I shall never forget the first time he imitated me to my
face. It gave me a most severe shock, for he did it so well that for a
moment I believed that one of my relations was actually in the room. One
thing I liked him for: he was devoted to Jack, and invariably bade him
a grave ‘good morning’ when he brought my cage down before breakfast.
He lived on a perch, to which he was chained by one leg, and up and
down this he would sidle by the hour, with one eye cocked for mischief.
Sometimes, when all was quiet, he would talk to himself in a language
quite unlike that which my master and his family used. The boys said it
was some African lingo which Joey had learnt ages ago in his native land.
Altogether a most uncanny bird!

Harry had a number of pet mice in wire cages. They were not the least
atom like any of the mice I had ever seen in the wood. These were of the
queerest colours—piebald—and some of them had marks on their backs just
the shape of a saddle. Uninteresting I called them, but Harry was very
fond of them, and used to take them out and let them run all over him.

In the darkest corner of the long, low room was the one creature that,
from the first moment I saw it, interested me more than all the others
put together. All day long it lay hidden in its hay bed and never moved,
but slept quietly as a dormouse in its winter nest. In fact, I never
set eyes on it at all until one night in August, when the evenings had
begun to draw in and I happened to be left a little later than usual in
the bowling-alley. No sooner had the room become dusk than I heard from
the tiny cage a little twittering, more like a young bird’s voice than
anything else, and presently caught sight of a dainty little head poked
out of the hay, with two of the largest, most liquid black eyes I ever
saw. I gazed in wonder, for the animal was so like myself that I felt
sure it was a squirrel, though I had never dreamed that any squirrel
existed so tiny as this.

Just then in came the two boys together.

[Illustration: HE IMITATED ME TO MY FACE]

‘Hulloa!’ cried Harry, ‘Lops is awake. Bring Nipper to have a look at
him, Jack.’

Jack took me out of my cage, and I jumped as usual on to his shoulder and
nibbled his ear by way of a kiss. He walked across to the other cage and
set me down in front of it.

‘Mr. Lops,’ he said with mock gravity, ‘allow me to introduce Mr. Nipper.
This is a small cousin of yours, Nipper, and he comes from Mexico. As you
see yourself, he’s a sad character—sleeps all day and only wakes up at
night.’

I was so lost in surprise that I sat quite still, gazing through the fine
wire mesh at my new acquaintance. I have always had a fairly good opinion
of my own looks, as every well-bred squirrel should have, but, upon my
word, he put me out of all conceit with myself. He was the tiniest,
daintiest, quaintest creature I ever set eyes on. No bright red about
him, but though his coat was darker and greyer than mine, it was as soft
as fine velvet, and beautifully groomed. His head was perfectly shaped,
his ears pricked like my own, and his eyes very large and amazingly
bright. But the oddest thing about him were the folds of loose skin which
extended in a thin membrane from all his four legs back to his body. When
he jumped from the upper, story of his cage to the lower, they spread
out almost like the wings of a bat; but when he was sitting still, they
folded up so that they did not in the least spoil his beautiful shape. I
must say that I felt quite envious, for I thoroughly understood that a
squirrel built like that could jump ever so much further than I or any of
my family could. We English squirrels can, at a pinch, clear as much as
three yards in a straight line. We always spread our legs wide when we
jump as well as keeping our tails stretched straight out, and that is why
we can leap from great heights and reach the ground unhurt, for we drop
parachute fashion. But as for these American cousins of ours, the flying
squirrels, they can jump from the top of one tree, and sliding through
the air like a soaring hawk, reach another tree fifty feet or more
away at a height from the ground only slightly less than that of their
starting-point.

Lops—which Jack said was short for Nyctalops, or ‘seer by night’—and I
had many a chat afterwards. He told me of his old home in sunny Mexico,
not a nest such as I was born in, but a cavity in the trunk of a vast
live oak or ilex, from whose boughs long weepers of grey Spanish moss
trailed towards the brown palmetto-stained water below; of the hot sun
and of the furious tropical storms which lashed the deep river into
white foam; of the paroquets, with their brilliant plumage of green and
red and blue, which screamed harshly among the upper branches at dawn;
of the rusty-hued water-vipers which coiled sluggishly on the steaming
mud in summer. He told, too, of the perils from great hawks three times
as large as any we know in England, from long, thin tree-snakes wrapped
unseen round the branches; and I shuddered when he talked of fierce
wild-cats as much at home among the tree-tops as on the ground. It must
have been a wonderful country and a wonderful life, so different from
our northern island as to be almost beyond my imagination to picture it.
All day the land slept breathless beneath the blazing sun, with nothing
moving except the birds, the fox-squirrels, and the lizards; and during
those hours Lops and his family slept in the dark recesses of their
wood-walled fortress; but when the sun set the forest woke to life. Deer
came down to the river to drink; peccaries rooted in droves among the
bases of the mighty trees; sometimes a great bear came prowling along,
uttering now and then a deep ‘woof’ when any unaccustomed sound disturbed
him. Up above opossums and racoons moved silently to and fro among the
tree-tops; great owls whirled on soft wings, hooting dismally; while all
night long—especially in the hot season—the endless chirr of crickets,
the pipe of tree-frogs and the deep booming of bull-frogs filled the air
with a never-ending concert. Other sounds there were, rarer, but far more
terrifying. Enormous bull-alligators, floating like logs with only their
gnarled heads and the ridges of their rugged backs above the water, would
bellow with a roar that shook the forest; or, again, from some hidden
recess of the deepest woods the blood-curdling shriek of the tawny puma
would ring hideously through the night.

Poor Lops! Though cared for as few pets are—fed with dainty pecan-nuts
and other delicacies from his far-off home across the ocean, and though
he loved his mistress Mabel, Jack’s sister, devotedly—yet he was never
happy as I was. The damp and cold of our climate oppressed him, and most
of his time he spent curled up tightly among the soft bedding of his
cage. Then, too, he was a creature of the night, and it was only after
dark that he would wake and want to play—and at that time, except for an
hour or two, there was no one to play with. I felt very sorry for him,
and so, too, were Mabel and the boys. I am sure that if they could they
would have set him free again among the great tropical forests that he
loved so well, and always mourned for, though only I knew how deeply.

As for me, life ran most pleasantly. I grew plump on the good food I
was supplied with. My coat became long and sleek, and my tail, which
had been a mere furry appendage like that of a little colt, grew into
a glorious brush of richest red-brown, long enough and thick enough to
cover me completely when I curled up to sleep. Jack was very proud of my
looks, and used to groom me all over with a little brush—a process which
I soon grew very fond of. We two came to understand one another most
marvellously. I could always tell him what I wanted, whether it was food,
or a game, or to be allowed to creep into his coat-pocket and go to sleep
there.

One day he opened my cage, slipped me into his pocket, and walked off,
and when he took me out again I was out of doors once more!

I cannot tell you how it affected me. You know, we wild creatures—born
wild, I mean—never quite forget our rightful heritage of freedom, and
here, for the first time for many weeks, I found myself out in the open.

Jack was seated on a wooden bench under a clump of evergreen shrubs in
the midst of a great expanse of smooth-shaven lawn. It was August now,
and the sun poured down hotter than ever it had been in those June days
in the wood. Big bumble-bees droned lazily by; a robin was perched on
the bare ground at the foot of an _arbor vitæ_, cocking a soft round eye
at us; all the subtle, fascinating odours of summer were in my nostrils.
I gave one spring from his knee on to the back of the bench, and sat
there, head high, snuffing the sweet air, and quivering all over with
excitement. Jack never moved, and for the moment he passed completely out
of my remembrance. My brain was crammed to bursting with half-forgotten
instincts and remembrances which crowded in upon me.

So I sat for perhaps half a minute; then a little breath of summer breeze
swayed a bough above me, and on the impulse I sprang. Oh, the delight of
feeling it yield and swing beneath me! I darted inwards to the trunk,
and with one clattering dash was up at its slender summit twenty feet
above the turf gazing round in wild delight. When the first ecstasy had
worn off, I set myself to explore, and, clambering down a little, jumped
into the next tree. So for many minutes I exercised my new-found powers,
taking longer and longer leaps, and enjoying myself to the top of my bent.

But the clump of shrubs was small, and soon I had exhausted its resources
in the way of jumps. I looked around, and a little way off was a giant
elm. Ah! that would give more scope; and with my head full of its
possibilities, I turned and came down head foremost. Then, and not till
then, did my eyes fall upon my master, who sat where I had left him,
still as ever. He looked at me, but I would not heed, and dashed off
across the lawn.

‘Hulloa, Jack! what price Nipper?’ came Harry’s voice from a distance.
‘You’ll never see him again.’

But the other only said, ‘You wait!’ and still sat stubbornly in his
place.

With a rattle of claws on rough bark I was up the elm like a flash, and,
half crazy with joy, went leaping and corkscrewing round and round,
sending a couple of tree-creepers off in a terrible fright. I think they
must have taken me for a cat. I played for a long time, and still Jack
sat on the bench. He seemed to be deep in a book, and after a time I got
quite cross at his apparent lack of interest in my proceedings. It was
getting late, and the trees threw long, dark shadows across the lawn.
The breeze had died down, and, except for the chirping of sparrows in
the ivy and the low whistle of some starlings in the distance, all was
very still. A sense of loneliness began to oppress me, and at last I came
creeping down, and, reaching the lower branch, once more looked across
towards my master.

‘Nipper!’ he called softly; and in a trice I was on the ground and
lopping across towards him.

Suddenly, and without the slightest warning, there was a sharp ‘yap-yap,’
and a dirty white-and-tan beast rushed out of the shrubbery behind me. On
the instant I was running for dear life.

I saw Jack bound to his feet and come tearing across towards me. But
instead of running straight to him, I made for the nearest tree—a small
ornamental evergreen. The dog—it was the gardener’s terrier—wheeled,
and was after me like a shot. He was travelling nearly twice as fast as
I, and his feet were drumming so close behind me that it seemed nothing
could save me. Each instant I expected to feel those snapping teeth close
upon me.

There was a sudden crash, and the sharp ‘yap-yap,’ changed to a terrified
howl. Jack had hurled his book with all his might and with such good
aim that the dog, hit full in the side, had been bowled completely over,
giving me time to gain the shrub and safety.

‘Poor old Nipper!’ said Jack softly, as he picked me shivering out of the
little tree and stowed me safely inside the breast of his coat. ‘We won’t
run any more risks of that sort, will we, old chap?’

Indeed, the fright was so severe that I did not get over it for some
time. It gave me a good lesson, and the next time my master let me out I
did not venture far from him.

Soon after this I had another adventure which came very near to closing
my career abruptly. One dull rainy morning I was loose as usual in Jack’s
bedroom. Just as he had almost finished dressing, his brother, whose room
was on the same floor, opened the door and called to my master to come
and help him to find one of his mice which had got loose and disappeared.
Jack ran out, carefully closing the door behind him, and leaving me to
play by myself. A few minutes afterwards one of the maids, thinking no
doubt that Jack had finished dressing and had gone down to his early
morning lesson with his tutor, came in to turn the bed down and tidy up.
She never saw me, and I paid no attention to her, for I was busy under
the dressing-table with some nuts.

It was some minutes after she had gone away that I became conscious of an
animal moving softly about the room, and a spasm of terror seized me, for
though I could not see it owing to the hangings of the dressing-table,
instinct—that sixth sense which informs us of danger—gave me warning of
desperate peril.

Crouching back as near to the wall as possible, I lay there absolutely
still, listening with beating heart to the almost noiseless footsteps
which came gradually nearer and nearer. I could tell by the soft snuffing
that the animal scented me, and terror almost paralysed me. Closer
and even closer came the creature, and presently the hangings of the
table rustled, and as they were pushed aside a whiskered head appeared,
and two eyes that glowed luminous green in the dim light glared upon
me. Stiffened in my corner I watched the cat crouch for a spring, her
gleaming eyes fixed greedily upon me, while her tail waving quickly from
side to side, made a soft tattoo on the carpet. Those cruel green eyes
absolutely fascinated me, and for the moment I could not have moved even
to save my life.

Suddenly came a loud crash. The door left open by the maid had blown to
in the strong draught from the open window. The noise startled the cat
almost as much as it did me, and for the moment she took her eyes off
me. The spell was broken and I ran for dear life. As I passed under the
hangings and out into the open I heard her heavier, larger body strike
the very spot where I been crouching, and with another spring she came
out from under the table and landed barely her own length behind me. One
wild bound to the right and I was inside the fender; another, and my
enemy’s outstretched paw actually grazed my tail as I bolted clean up the
chimney, and a snarl of disappointed rage gave me the glad tidings that I
was for the moment safe.

It was lucky, indeed, for me that the chimneys of the Hall were of the
wide, old-fashioned brick type unprovided with dampers. Had it not been
so, and had my refuge been the modern, narrow, perpendicular form of
grate, it is certain that I should never have been alive now. As it was,
the worn, old brickwork gave me footing of a kind, and I never stopped
until I had reached the chimney-pot, which barred further progress.
The soot nearly choked me, and made me cough and sneeze violently. My
foothold was most precarious and I was in deadly terror that I might slip
and go tumbling right back into the jaws of my enemy. Indeed, I have
rarely spent a worse quarter of an hour than I did then.

Suddenly I heard the door below open. Sounds came to me almost as clearly
as if I had been in the room.

‘Nipper! Nipper!’ I heard Jack call, but I was too frightened to come
down.

‘Why, where on earth has he got to?’ my master continued in a surprised
tone, and then I heard him moving about the room looking for me.

The cat, no doubt, had taken refuge under the dressing-table again when
she heard the door open, for she knew as well as possible that she had no
right in the bedrooms, her proper place being the kitchen. There was a
rustle as Jack raised the hangings, and then he saw her.

For the moment there is no doubt but that he thought she had killed and
eaten me, and grief and fury possessed him. I heard a smothered squawk of
terror, and even in my plight rejoiced that my enemy was feeling a little
of the fright she had given me. Then there was a crash. Jack had flung
the beast clean out of the window into the elm opposite. I heard him go
to the door again, and there was something in his voice as he shouted to
his brother to come that made me shiver all over, but not with fright.

Harry came rushing into the room, and I am bound to say his voice was
almost as queer as that of my master.

I was recovering slowly from my terror, and the sound of Jack’s voice was
giving me confidence. Also my present refuge was horribly uncomfortable,
and the black soot making me feel perfectly miserable, so I turned with
the intention of making my way downwards again. You know we squirrels
always descend head foremost, holding on with our hind-claws. But I had
hardly begun my descent when a bit of hardened soot or plaster gave
way beneath me. I made a desperate but quite useless effort to recover
myself, and next thing I was sliding helplessly down the steep slope at a
pace which increased with every foot I fell.

Thud! And I landed in the grate amid a perfect avalanche of soot. Jack,
who was sitting on the bed looking more miserable than I had ever seen
him before, sprang to his feet as if electrified, and cleared the
intervening space with a bound.

‘Nipper, Nipper, is it you?’ he shouted, and regardless of his smart,
clean flannel suit picked me up and positively hugged me in a transport
of delight. Then he examined me all over to make sure that I was not
hurt, and after that I was only too glad to be allowed to crawl into his
pocket and feel that there, at any rate, I was safe.

The worst of it came after breakfast, for I was too filthy to be able to
clean myself. Such a miserable, draggled little object I was, black as
any sweep! My master got a basin of warm water and washed me all over—a
process which I remember I strongly objected to, and resented by nipping
his fingers sharply. But he was firm, and presently I was back again in
my cage, which was placed before the kitchen fire, and Jack himself kept
watch over me until, once more dry and clean, I was fit to return to the
bowling-alley.




CHAPTER IV

A DAY IN RAT LAND


It was about this time that an unaccustomed quiet seemed to be settling
upon the Hall and the demesne. There were less people about, no visitors,
and some familiar faces among the servants were missed. I had never seen
much of the Squire himself, but in these days he seldom came into the
bowling-alley at all, as he had been used to do in the earlier days of my
captivity. Even the boys seemed to have grown quieter. They laughed less
often, and frequently I saw them talking to one another with grave faces.

At times I had an uneasy conviction of something wrong, but it was only
a passing impression, for I, at least, never suffered in any way. Every
fine day Jack took me out of doors, and I had a scamper in the clump of
shrubs to which, ever since my narrow escape from the terrier, I was
careful to confine myself. And as for food, no squirrel could have fared
better. My master was always bringing me fresh delicacies. One day it
would be a cob of Indian corn, which grew to perfection under the south
wall of the kitchen garden, and which I enjoyed vastly, ripping off
the thick green husks and pulling the kernels out one by one. Another
morning he would pick me a fine summer apple, its sunny side delicately
tinged with streaky red, while he was always discovering new nuts for
my delectation. Once, I remember, I made myself quite ill with the rich
greasy kernel of a huge Brazil-nut. A very pet delicacy of mine in which
I was often indulged was a piece of hard ship’s biscuit. There were few
other eatables which I enjoyed so much. Now and then I was given a morsel
of banana, and perhaps my greatest treat of all was a few of the black,
oily seeds of the sunflower.

So things went on until the time that the blackberries began to ripen.
Then, one warm sunny morning Jack got up very early and dressed quickly.
I wanted to play as usual, but he seemed to have no time, and I was
quite hurt at his apparent neglect. As he took me in my cage to the
bowling-alley the Squire was in the hall. I had never seen him there so
early. He looked old, and worn, and there were new lines in his face,
while his hair and beard seemed greyer than I had thought them.

‘Be quick and have your breakfast, Jack,’ I heard him say. ‘Your train
goes at nine, remember.’

‘All right, dad,’ returned the boy. ‘Take care of Nipper while I’m gone.’

Then, when he had put me in my place in the bowling-alley just opposite
old Joey’s perch, he did a very unusual thing—took me out again and
stroked me. Then he put me back very gently and hurried away.

The morning passed; but when afternoon came and I looked for my master,
as usual, there was no sign of him. I scratched vehemently at my
cage-door, but no one came. Only old Joey made rude remarks and began to
mimic me, so at last I retired in a very bad temper, and curling up in my
hay began to wonder whether Jack had forgotten me. You see we had never
been separated for a single day, and I could not in the least understand
his absence.

At last some one came in, and I jumped out eagerly. But, to my great
disappointment, it was Harry, not Jack, who came up and opened the door
of my cage. ‘Poor old Nipper!’ he said, and held out his hand, inviting
me to come with him.

I came eagerly enough, for I had the idea that he would take me to my
master. The two brothers were so nearly inseparable that I could not
imagine one being long away from the other. He did not, however, carry
me out of doors, but up to his own room, where he turned me loose and
offered me biscuit. But I am afraid he found me a dull companion, for I
was listening the whole time for Jack’s familiar footstep, and did not
pay much attention to his friendly overtures. At last he took me back to
the bowling-alley and shut me up again, and there I moped sulkily for the
rest of the day.

Night came on, and no Jack. I could not eat, but sat awake all night,
hoping for and expecting my master. Next morning Harry came to feed
me, and was horrified when he found that I had not eaten my supper. He
brought me every delicacy that he could think of, and at last, just to
please him, I ate a nut or two. That evening he was taking me up to his
room again, but as we got to the door I hopped out of his pocket and
scampered off to Jack’s door. He let me in, and though it was a fresh and
bitter disappointment not to find my master, yet I felt a little happier
among the familiar surroundings, and plucked up spirit enough to dig out
a nut which I had hidden in his big bath-sponge and eat it. So that night
Harry turned me loose in his brother’s room. I went to bed in a pocket of
one of Jack’s old coats which hung against the door, and tried hard to
imagine that my master was wearing it.

It was morning when I poked my head out. There was the smooth, white,
empty bed, and still no sign of Jack. Presently the maid came in, and
not seeing me, opened the window to air the room. After she had gone I
clambered out of the coat-pocket and began aimlessly wandering about the
room. Presently I found myself on the window-sill, and, catching sight of
the elm branches waving close by, with one spring I was in the tree, and,
running down the trunk, rapidly reached the grass. Outside the shadow
of the tree the wide, smooth lawn sparkled with thick dew. I had never
been out so early before, and I greatly disliked the cold wetness of the
grass. But so anxious was I to find Jack that I hardly thought of the
discomfort, and I made my way with all speed to the bench where he so
often sat.

But he was not there. All was deserted and strangely quiet; only the
thrushes hopped past searching for their breakfast of worms, and a robin
sang from the sunny summit of a clump of evergreens.

Often I had perched upon Jack’s shoulder as he strolled round to the
stables to see his pony Tarbrush. To visit the stable was the next idea
that came to me, and keeping as close as possible to the friendly shrubs
and trees, I worked quickly round through the garden till I came to the
belt of laurels which lay between the back premises and the stables.

I felt happier when I was off the ground and among the branches of the
shrubs, and climbing quickly through them, soon came to the gate of the
stable-yard.

There were cats here. I had seen them on my previous visits, and under
any other circumstances nothing would have induced me to venture alone
into the long, paved yard. But anxiety to find my master swallowed up all
other considerations, and dropping from the laurels, I made straight for
the door of Tarbrush’s stall.

There was no one in sight. Only from a stall on the other side came the
hissing of a groom busy about a horse.

Imagine my dismay to find Tarbrush’s loose-box empty! So, too, were the
other boxes in the same building. The place was absolutely deserted and
deathly still. Feeling more lonely and miserable than ever, I turned
uncertainly. I did not know where to go or what to do next; then I
remembered that there was one other place where Jack had sometimes taken
me—an old and long-disused stable at the far end of the yard, where his
sister Mabel kept her hutches of tame rabbits.

The place was large and cool and dark. The windows had long ago been
boarded up, and the back was shaded by thick shrubbery, through which the
early sun had not yet pierced. I moved just inside the door, and sat up,
listening keenly. But all that I could hear was the munch, munch of the
rabbits’ teeth as they ate their breakfast of crisp leaves and roots.
There was no human in the place.

At that moment a new sound broke upon my ear, a slight rustling, brushing
noise. Then, before I could even turn, a large tabby cat came round the
corner of the doorway. It was my old enemy, the same who had so nearly
caught me in Jack’s bedroom. She was walking very slowly, rubbing her
arched back against the wall as she went, and, terrified as I was, I had
sense enough to see that she had not yet noticed me. I did the only thing
I could—crouched down close against the wall and remained there still as
a hare in her forme, hardly even breathing.

For a moment I fancied that she would pass on. But I had forgotten her
keen sense of smell. Suddenly she threw her head up and began snuffing
the air; then with one quick bound leaped inside the doorway, and stood
there perfectly still glaring about her with great, round green eyes.

I did not wait, but ran for dear life. As I started so did she, and to
the best of my belief she jumped clean over me. I certainly felt the wind
of her paw as she struck at my head.

In the old stable the mangers and racks were still in place and the
ruinous remains of the partitions of the stalls. More by good luck than
anything else, I chanced upon a worm-eaten oak post at the end of one
partition and bolted up it. It led straight up through a gap in the
ceiling, and I thought I was safe. I was sadly mistaken. This cat was
almost as good a climber as I, and up she came at my very brush.

Scuttling up the wall of the loft, I reached a cross rafter, not twice my
own length ahead of my hunter. The cat was not quite so quick in getting
on to the rafter as I was, and that gave me a short start.

A patch of sunlight came through a glassless window under the gable at
the far end, and instinctively I made for this, jumping frantically from
rafter to rafter. There was no time for plans. It was just one wild dash
for any chance of safety.

The rafters were not very wide apart, not too far for me to jump from one
to another with fair ease. But they were rough-hewn and narrow at the
top, and the heavier cat could not get a foothold so quickly as I; so I
gained all the way to the window. The second rafter from the window was
a very narrow and awkward one. Even I found it hard to balance myself
upon it. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of something hanging from the
last rafter, the only one left between me and the window. It was a
peculiar-looking, pear-shaped object, grey in colour, rough in texture,
and in size rather larger than my body. I knew well enough what it was,
though in my fright I barely noticed it. Next instant I had landed
just above it, then, gathering all my powers for a longer leap than
any before, launched myself towards the window-sill. I just succeeded
in reaching it, only to find that the opening was covered with wire
netting. I was hopelessly trapped.

Hot-foot after me came the cat. She could jump as well or better than I,
but, as I said before, the narrowness of the beams bothered her. When
she reached the narrowest, the second from the window, she had all she
could do to keep her balance. The result was that her next jump was a
trifle short. Her fore-paws clutched the beam, but her hind-feet failed
to reach it, and struggling desperately to pull herself up, she drove her
hind-claws deep into the pear-shaped object which hung exactly below her.

Instantly there arose a deep-toned buzzing, and the air was thick with
a cloud of furious wasps. There followed a perfect squeal of pain and
terror, and my enemy, covered with a swarm of the fierce little stinging
insects, dropped with a resounding thump on to the boards below, and fled
like a mad thing, pursued by scores of angry wasps.

The wasps rose to the very roof; they were all round me. I made one
frantic scramble up the rusty netting, found a hole, squeezed through
anyhow, and just as the first wasp landed on my back and drove a vicious
sting through my thick fur, took a wild jump in the direction of the
nearest shrub.

The distance was too much for me. My fore-paws just touched the leaves,
and I went sailing downwards into the deep shadows beneath. Down, down
into absolute blackness, to land at last with a shock that for the
moment completely deprived me of my few remaining senses. Fortunately
for us squirrel folk and all other animals except man, we never remain
insensible for long. I was all awake again in a very few moments, and
found myself lying on a thick bed of damp, decaying leaves. It was
almost pitch dark, but a little light which leaked down from somewhere
high above showed me that I was at the bottom of a deep hole, with
perpendicular sides of mouldering brickwork.

But this was not what set my heart beating again almost as thickly as
a moment previously. It was a peculiar, musty, unpleasant odour, which
made me instinctively spring up against the side of the hole and struggle
hard to climb back to daylight. But rough as the walls of my prison were,
my claws could get no grip, and I fell back panting and helpless to the
bottom. Again and again I tried. The brickwork was very old, covered with
close green moss and riddled with holes, and more than once I succeeded
in climbing a good distance up the sides. But I always came at last to
some place where I could find no foothold, and went sliding helplessly
down to the bottom again.

Soon I was quite exhausted. I had eaten hardly anything since Jack left,
and the escape from the cat and the shock of my long fall had taken it
out of me badly. At last I was forced to give it up and lay at full
length breathing hard upon the sodden leaves.

Presently came a soft rustling sound, then a slight squeak. By this time
my eyes were well accustomed to the gloom, and looking upwards, there at
the mouth of one of the holes a sharp black nose appeared and a pair of
beady, black eyes which stared at me fixedly. A moment later another nose
showed from another hole, then a third, and a fourth. More and more came
out, until the whole of the slimy old wall seemed alive with them, and
all with their keen unwinking eyes fixed upon me as I crouched helpless
in the bottom of the old dry well.

[Illustration: THE WHOLE OF THE SLIMY OLD WALL SEEMED ALIVE WITH THEM.]

In the woods we squirrels seldom trouble about rats. In some of the old
banks and hedgerows there are hundreds of them, but they don’t interfere
with us as they do with the earth-livers and with the birds that nest
on the ground. They cannot harm us tree-dwellers. But we do not trust
them, any more than do the rest of the woodland folk. Cruel, cunning and
treacherous, the grey Hanoverian rat is the most detested and despised of
all the animals, and the vile odour of his unclean body at once drives
away all other creatures from his neighbourhood. For myself, I have
and always had a perfect horror of rats. Mother once told us a ghastly
story of how one of our people, accidentally caught in a steel trap,
was literally eaten alive by rats. And here I was, in an almost equally
helpless case, at the mercy of a score of the carrion brutes.

If there had been only one of them, I should not have been afraid. A
solitary rat is always a coward, but in packs they are as fierce as
weasels. For a long time they watched me without moving. The musty
carrion odour grew worse and worse. Presently there was more rustling,
and I saw the heads pushed out farther and farther from the dark recesses
in the sides of the well. Then they began to squeak. They were talking,
asking one another if it was safe to attack me. Suddenly one great brute,
as big again as I, dropped from his hole almost on top of me. Fright gave
me strength to make a last bid for life. I made another wild dash at the
side of my prison, and instantly the rats all vanished. This time I was
lucky enough to find a piece of wall rough enough to give me foothold,
and though my claws slipped again and again, yet each time I managed
somehow to save myself, and at last reached a deep, square niche in the
wall where a number of bricks seemed to have fallen out. Here there was
room to sit, and I had sense enough to stay where I was and rest before
trying anything else.

My rush had only frightened the rats for the moment. Very soon the
rustling and squeaking began again, and louder than before. The heads
reappeared, and as each came out the keen nose was turned upwards and the
beady eyes fixed upon me again. Two or three sprang down into the bottom
of the well and began snuffing about. I saw several little ones appear.
All the rats were very quiet and leisurely in their movements. Evidently
they felt perfectly certain that I could not escape. I could see them
licking their greasy lips in anticipation of their meal.

Certainly I was better off in one way. I had climbed so high that now
I was above their ring of holes. But above me the brickwork was less
decayed. There was no foothold at all. Plainly I could not possibly
climb any higher. Even if the rats did not come after me where I was,
it was only a matter of time before I was starved out and dropped down
amongst them.

A long time passed, and though the rats still moved about at the bottom
of the well, none came near me. I saw the sunlight begin to pierce
through the shrubs above, and patches of light shone on the rusty iron
railings which surrounded the top of the old well, and even gleamed
on the green moss which coated its sides. But none reached me where I
crouched, shivering in the cold and damp.

A dog barked somewhere up above, and then at last I heard human footsteps
pass across the crackling leaves close to the well mouth. They were
Harry’s. I shivered all over with excitement, and gave the little bark
which was my call to Jack; but evidently he did not hear me, and the
steps passed on, and all was quiet again. Even the rats had stopped
squeaking, and most of them had gone back to their holes. Only the old
buck who had jumped down at first was sitting in front of his hole below
and opposite me, seemingly half asleep, but really keeping a watchful eye
upon me.

The sunlight slowly faded, and the shadow of the stable fell across the
mouth of the well. Night was coming—night, when the rats would surely
attack me. I was desperately hungry, though I do not think that just then
I could have eaten the finest nut in the coppice. At last the first star
twinkled overhead. For some time the rats had been moving again. I could
hear them, though I could not see them. The bustle increased with the
darkness, and there was more squeaking.

Presently I heard something climbing towards me. It was the father rat.
Of that I was certain, though I could not see him. He came up slowly but
steadily, and I shook all over with fresh panic.

All day I had sat quite still in my nook, staring upwards in the hope of
seeing Jack’s head up above. I had not even once taken a look round my
place of refuge. Now, as my enemy came stealthily nearer I backed into
the recess. The hole ran in further than I had supposed, and I went in
twice my own length before touching the brickwork.

Suddenly there was a slight snuffing sound. The rat was over the edge,
and right upon me. What happened next I hardly know. I made a blind,
panic-stricken rush, and found myself wedged between two bricks. The
rat’s jaws closed upon my brush. I struggled madly, and suddenly I was
free and scuttling away down a sort of tunnel. Away I went, bumping
against the top and sides, but still finding room to run.

Seemingly the great rat had been unable to squeeze through the narrow
aperture in which even my small self had been caught for the moment, but
at the time I do not think that I knew that. My one idea was to run,
and run I did, plunging blindly on and on through the black dark like
a rabbit with a stoat at its scut. I remember very little about that
horrible tunnel or how I got through it. I only know that it was wet and
slimy in places, and that it seemed as though I could not breathe. If it
had not been for the fear of the rat I should never have been able to go
on. But I fully believed that the bloodthirsty monster was behind me all
the time, and each instant expected to feel the sharp teeth close upon
me; so, breathless and suffocating, I kept on, until at last there was
a break in the darkness, and next instant I tumbled headlong out of the
mouth of a drain-pipe into the muddy bed of a dried-up pool.

I was so absolutely exhausted that there I lay, quite unable to stir
brush or claw. If any prowling cat or weasel had happened upon me I could
not have lifted a paw to get away. But nothing did molest me, and after
a long time I managed to struggle out of the mud and up the bank on to
a patch of grass. When I looked round I found that I was in the Hall
kitchen-garden.

I knew my way from there to the house, and slowly and wearily dragged
myself back. I made for the elm by Jack’s window, climbed up it, and,
finding a nook in a fork between two boughs, curled up, and was fast
asleep in a moment.

In the morning I saw that the window was wide open, so, jumping in, I
climbed upon Jack’s bed and curled my muddy little body up on the pillow.

There Harry found me, and I am bound to say that Jack himself never made
as much fuss about me as his brother did on that occasion.




CHAPTER V

BACK TO THE WOODLANDS


About four in the afternoon of the next day I was lying half-asleep in
my cage in the bowling-alley when a sound in the distance made me spring
up, quivering all over with excitement. Next moment the door burst open,
and in rushed Jack. He never even waited to take off his hat or gloves,
but ran up the long room, and flung open my cage door. With one bound I
was on his shoulder, nosing him and biting his ears and hair in a perfect
transport of delight, and I think he was just as glad as I was.

Presently his sister’s voice called him from behind. He turned and kissed
her, and with me still on his shoulder, followed her to the Hall, where
the Squire and Mrs. Fortescue were at tea.

After this Jack and I became more inseparable than ever. He had
holidays—these days—and I simply lived in his pocket. The next afternoon
there was great excitement. I heard every one congratulating Jack,
though of course I did not in the least comprehend why his mother and
sister hugged and kissed him, and the Squire solemnly shook hands with
him. It was just as well for me that I did not realize what had happened,
or those lovely September days would have been the most miserable
instead of the happiest in the whole of my life; for Jack had passed an
examination with the result that in a few weeks he would have to go and
live and work in London—a dreadful place, I understand—where it is all
houses and no trees, where the sun never shines, and where the only wild
creatures that exist are those cheeky, chattering thieves, the sparrows.

Harry, too, was always with his brother at this time, and they talked
more than I had ever known them to do before.

The two were very serious one day, lying on their backs beneath the
trees on the lawn while I ran all over them both impartially. And from
the way in which they turned to me and caught me up every now and then,
as well as because I heard my own name frequently spoken, I came to the
conclusion the conversation had something to do with my fate. And there
was no doubt it had, for it was after this time they all left the Hall,
and when I visited it again there were strangers—but I mustn’t go on
too fast. I fancy Jack urged Harry to keep me while he himself was away,
and Harry shook his head; perhaps he was afraid I might mope away, as I
did before in Jack’s absence, and end by dying. Anyway, a gloomy silence
settled again between the brothers. At last Jack started up and waved
his hand energetically in the direction of the wood; then, springing to
his feet, he called to me to come to him. I had leaped away in affright
at his sudden movements, to which I never could get accustomed, but I
returned again at once. Jack had quite sense enough to know squirrels
mate for life, and the young ones usually stay with their parents all
the winter; and he knew, what I did not, that mother and Hazel and Rusty
would still be in the coppice to greet me, and teach me all the wild-wood
lore, even though my father was dead.

The brothers argued for some time over my prospective fate, but I did
not really understand until later, when their actions showed me what
they meant. I had leaped from Jack’s shoulder during this weighty
conversation, and was enjoying myself hugely, tearing round and round the
two boys, and making an occasional dive into Jack’s pocket after the nuts
and grains of wheat and maize which were always to be found there. But,
after all, I was not taken away to the woodlands at once.

Three or four days later Jack again got up very early, and as he dressed
I could hear out on the drive a great grinding of heavy wheels. As Jack
hurried down he took me on his shoulder instead of putting me in my cage.
His brother joined him on the stairs, and they walked down side by side,
as solemnly as two old crows.

The hall was full of crates and matting, and men in green baize aprons
were turning everything upside down. Outside, in the ring, were great
vans almost as big as cottages. The boys hardly wasted a glance on these
things, but hurried past, and next moment were striding away across the
dewy grass of the lawn.

I was amazed at being taken out so early, but all the same very much
delighted, and sat on my master’s shoulder chattering with joy. Neither
brother spoke, but walked steadily on under the long morning shadows of
the tall elms until they reached the ha-ha which cut the garden off from
the park. Jumping down the sunk fence, they turned to the right, passed
under the shadow of the wall of the kitchen-garden, and along beside the
laurel plantation beyond. A wicket-gate led through the park fence and
into a large field, in which red cattle were grazing.

Strange memories began to stir in my breast as a line of tall, thick
timber came in sight on the far side of the meadow; and when my master
jumped the little brook and walked up over some broken, sandy ground
where the white scuts of rabbits bobbed among the bracken, towards the
tall magpie hedge beyond, my heart was beating so violently that I could
only sit quite still upon his shoulder and stare about me in a sort of
mazed bewilderment.

On through the gate, and at once we were plunged into deep, damp
coolness. All the half-forgotten odours of moss and bracken and rotting
wood, and a hundred other woodland scents, rose to my distended nostrils
and almost overpowered me. Just then I could not have moved for the life
of me.

Harry was the first to break the silence.

‘That’s where I saw the little beggars the other day, Jack,’ he said
softly, and pointed to a tall beech-tree whose leaves, just beginning
to yellow with the first chill of autumn, hung motionless in the still
morning air.

Then they both seated themselves on a mossy log and waited, still as
two dormice. The wild things of the woods, frightened into silence at
these early morning intruders, gradually regained confidence. A rabbit
popped out of his hole and began feeding on the close turf, on which the
autumn dew-spangles gleamed in a patch of sunshine which struck through
the leafy canopy overhead. A shrew-mouse, intent on some business of his
own, bustled noiselessly across the path; a woodpecker started his tap,
tap, tap, as he industriously probed a rotten branch for his breakfast of
fat grubs; two jays began calling harshly, and presently the flicker of
their brilliant blue plumage glanced through the greenery. As for me, I
had crept off Jack’s shoulder, and, sitting up straight on one end of the
log, was struggling desperately to take it all in.

The boys never moved nor spoke, but presently Harry touched his brother
gently, and pointed very cautiously towards the beech-tree. I, too,
was gazing with all my eyes up into the tree, my heart throbbing more
violently than ever, for down the smooth grey bark a patch of red-brown
fur was softly stealing with slow, deliberate steps, clutching tightly at
unseen footholds with outstretched claws. The boys saw him, and so did I,
but we none of us moved. As for me, my feelings were beyond words.

Nearer he came, and now I saw that he was almost my own double. His head
was stretched out at right angles to his body, and his eyes, bright
as two jewels, were fixed upon me with intensest curiosity. Presently
he reached the lowest bough, and there stood motionless as I was, and
staring at me with a strange intensity. The calls of kindred were
clamouring in my veins, and all of a sudden the spell was broken. Without
one backward look at my dear master, I jumped from the log, raced across
the ground between it and the tree, and with one rattle of claws was up
on the huge, lowest branch.

But behold! the apparition which had attracted me had disappeared, and I
stared round in fresh wonder. Suddenly came a little sharp cry, and down
from the leaves above me dropped—my mother herself! She gave a sharp bark
of astonishment.

Then I remembered! A mad transport of joy thrilled me through and
through, and with one wild dash I tore away up the tree, corkscrewing
madly round and round the huge trunk in the way we squirrels have when
joy is beyond expression.

Mother was with me, and next instant a third squirrel joined in our mad
frolic. It was my brother Rusty, the squirrel whom I had seen first of
all, and had failed to recognize after our long separation. Before I
reached the top, yet a fourth frantic dot of red fur was flashing round
and round, barking madly, and I knew her for my sister Hazel. I think
we were all quite mad with joy for the time being, and we never ceased
our crazy scamperings until, quite out of breath, we landed all together
in a fork among the branches high up in the leafy summit of the tall
beech-tree. There we sat and began a talk that lasted I don’t know how
long. It was the most curious thing. I had been away from them all so
long, and become so accustomed to human talk, that I could hardly make my
family understand my adventures, and they, on their part, were surprised
beyond measure that any of the humans, whom they had so long looked upon
as their hereditary enemies, could possibly have been so kind to me.
But at last they had all my story, and then, and not till then, did the
recollection of Jack come back to me.

When I announced my intention of going down again to find my master,
mother evidently thought I was quite out of my senses.

‘But you have escaped. Surely you do not want to go back to live in your
prison!’ she urged.

[Illustration: THE BOYS NEVER MOVED OR SPOKE.]

I explained all over again what a good friend he had been to me, how he
had saved my life, how he had fed me with all sorts of dainties; indeed,
I strongly recommended her and my brother and sister to come with me.
There was plenty of room, I said, and I waxed enthusiastic over the
unlimited supplies of nuts, and fruit, and grain without any trouble in
looking for them.

It was not the slightest good. Mother declared that the notion of living
inside burrows—for that was her idea of a house and its rooms—was
altogether detestable, and only fit for rabbits and humans, and would
most certainly kill her in a very short time. All I could do, after much
urging, was to persuade my family to come down to the lower branch and
watch me go and talk to Jack.

Rusty was quite ready—he always had a bold, determined streak about him;
but mother and Hazel hung back. When we got down, there was my dear
master sitting where I had left him, all alone. Harry had left. His face
lighted up when he saw me hopping along the branch above him, and he gave
the little whistle I knew so well, and stood up. Running to the pendent
tip of the branch, I made a flying leap, and landed clean on the top of
his cap.

‘Why, Nipper, Nipper,’ he said, taking me on his hand and stroking me
fondly, ‘I almost thought you had forgotten me!’

I nibbled his finger lovingly by way of apology, and signified that I was
quite ready for a nut. It was promptly forthcoming, and then as I ate it
he put me down on the log, and walking softly towards the tree, turned
out two pockets stuffed with the finest hazel-nuts, and piled them by
handfuls into a hollow as high as he could reach.

Then he sat down again beside me, took me up and talked to me, and petted
me for a long time. At last, very slowly and reluctantly, he put me back
on the branch from which I had leaped down.

‘Good-bye, old chap,’ he said in a queer, unsteady voice, and suddenly
turned and walked quickly away.

To say that I was astonished would be putting it mildly. I was absolutely
thunderstruck, but after a minute made up my mind it was some new kind of
game, and prepared to follow.

‘Scud! Scud!’ I heard mother call, but I paid no attention. Running along
the branch as far as it would bear, I made a flying leap into the next
tree. It had been my dear father’s boast that he could travel from one
end of our coppice to the other without once touching ground, and indeed
I found no difficulty in doing the same. I was so excited that I thought
nothing of jumps of six times my own length, for Jack was walking very
fast, and I was in a dreadful fright that I might be left behind.

At the gate he turned and saw me. He stood a moment irresolute, then
quickly vaulted the gate and started off across the field. At this I grew
quite desperate, and dropping into the hedge scuttled along it, reached
the gate-post, and sitting straight up gave one sharp bark. At that my
master turned again and hurried back.

‘Oh, Nipper, why can’t you go home?’ he muttered, and picking me up,
walked very fast back to the big beech-tree.

‘Good-bye, once more, old fellow,’ he said stooping over me, and suddenly
I was startled by a drop like rain falling on my head.

Looking up in amazement, I saw my dear master’s face twisted as though in
pain; but before I could make up my mind what was the matter, he suddenly
pitched me gently back into the hollow where he had put me before, and
brushing his sleeve across his face, fairly ran away down the path.
Before I well realized what had happened, he was lost to sight among the
trees.

As soon as I recovered a little from my astonishment, I started a second
time for the gate; but before I reached it Jack was half-way across the
field, and travelling so fast that I knew I could never catch him; and
besides, I had always been terribly afraid of the ground ever since my
escape from the terrier.

I don’t think that ever in my life have I felt so utterly miserable as
when I realized that my master had abandoned me. You see, I could not
understand it at all, and my one sensation was an utter and overwhelming
loneliness. Gradually, too, I became frightened. I had never been
alone out of doors before, and this was all so different to the Hall
garden. The field seemed a vast green desert, and behind me the wood an
illimitable rustling mystery full of unseen perils. How long I sat there
straining my eyes after the vanished form of my master I do not know,
but what roused me at last was a sudden rustle behind, which made me
start violently. However, it was only Rusty, who had followed me, and
was seated on a swinging hazel-bough in the hedge, staring at me in a
perplexed fashion.

‘What’s the matter, Scud?’ he asked at last.

I told him I felt very forlorn now that my master had left me. My brother
could not believe that I wanted to follow him; such a thing was quite
beyond his comprehension.

When I assured him it was true, Rusty looked as solemn as if he was now
certain that I had quite taken leave of my senses.

‘What! You want to go back and live in those burrows when you’ve got all
the wood to roam in!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll be shot if I can understand
you! Do you mean that you’d rather spend your time all alone in a place
you can’t get out of than go foraging round with us all day as free
as—as’—Rusty’s imagination failed him, and he paused—‘well—as free as a
squirrel, for there’s no other creature in the woods that is as free as
we are.’

I reminded him that I was used to being protected, and had never
experienced anything but the utmost gentleness from Jack and his family.

‘Yes, I know. I’m sure he is quite different from those red-faced brutes
who broke our nest down and killed poor father,’ replied Rusty. ‘And he
has left us nuts enough for a month. But all his kind are so big and so
dull. They can’t climb trees like us, or jump;’ and my brother made a
splendid spring down to my side just to show what he could do. ‘It’s no
kind of life for a squirrel. My brush, but I should have taken the first
chance to run off and come back home!’

Then he gave a sudden low cry of warning, and instinctively I followed
him as he bounded back into the thick of the hedge just as a hen
sparrow-hawk stooped like a falling stone out of the blue above, reaching
the grass by a tuft of gorse a little way out in the field. There was a
sharp cry, cut short almost before it was uttered, and then the feathered
robber rose again, bearing in her crooked talons the struggling form of
a linnet. A few small feathers floated away through the still, warm air,
and all was over. The hawk sailed away towards a distant tree with her
meal tight clutched between her claws.

It was long since I had seen one of these everyday woodland tragedies,
and it made me realize with a shock that now I had myself only to depend
upon, with no strong human hand to aid me. Frightened and unhappy, I
followed Rusty quietly back into the heart of the coppice, and that night
saw me one of a furry ball of four, curled in a hole in the heart of the
great beech.




CHAPTER VI

A NARROW ESCAPE


I did not forget my master and settle down to my old out-door life
at once. Every morning for many days I visited the gate at the end
of the wood-path, and sat there or in the hedge beside it, straining
my eyes across the meadow in the hope that Jack might come back once
more. But never a sign of him or Harry did I see, and though, as the
leaves began to fall, it was quite easy to view the roof of the Hall
across the shrubberies, no smoke rose from the tall, twisted red-brick
chimney-stacks.

How good mother was to me in those days I well remember. She encouraged
me to tell her all I could of the Hall and its people, and all the
incidents of my captivity, and she alone of my family seemed thoroughly
to sympathize with me in my longing for my lost master.

Hazel, too, was very dear and good, and would listen with the greatest
interest to my long yarns. She was a sweet little thing in those days,
very small, but extremely well built and active, and, for a young
squirrel, of a peculiarly rich colour. Rusty, however, had little
sympathy with my longings. He was already a large, powerful squirrel of
an extremely independent turn of mind, and most extraordinarily bold and
fearless. Mother was in a constant state of anxiety about him, for he
would go off on long expeditions quite alone, sometimes not coming home
till nearly sunset, and ever since father’s death mother had been nervous
as a hare when any of her children were out of her sight.

As for me, I soon became thoroughly at home in the wood, and could climb
as well as either my brother or my sister, though I was at first by
no means so adept at taking shelter as the other two. I had grown so
accustomed to many sights and sounds ordinarily alarming to one of our
tribe, that mother had often to scold me for exposing myself heedlessly
to view on the rare occasions when people walked through the wood, and
she had to show me all over again the tricks of lying out flat on a bough
so that I could not be seen by passers-by, or of supporting myself on a
trunk beneath a sheltering branch when danger in the shape of a hawk
threatened from above.

The good and plentiful food with which I had always been supplied at the
Hall had made me fat and strong beyond what squirrels usually are at my
age. There was very little difference now between me and Rusty, though
originally I had been smaller. It was lucky for me that I had been turned
loose just at this special time of year, for autumn is, of course, the
squirrel’s harvest, and food was particularly plentiful that season. Nuts
were ripening among the yellowing leaves; acorns were to be had for the
picking; the beech-trees were full of mast, and when we tired of these
there were spruce-seeds and berries of every description.

Earlier in the year larch, fir, pine, and spruce tips had been our main
sustenance, but these were now getting dry and old, for it was past the
season of evergreen growth, and so we left them alone and fed almost
entirely on nuts and seeds.

About this time we had several days of soft warm rain, and after them
part of the horse pasture which adjoined the coppice on the other side
from the Hall was thickly dotted each morning with little white buttons,
which mother explained to me were mushrooms. We used to steal down
across the wet grass in the mornings, brushing through the gossamer
spiders’ webs till our chests and paws were white with them, and feast
royally on the tenderest and daintiest of the mushrooms, sometimes
getting terrible frights when the village children who came to fill their
baskets saw us, and clapped their hands to make us run.

Mother was a wonderful forager. I remember one morning how she stopped on
the bank where the beech-trees grow thickest, and after snuffing a moment
or two, began to dig rapidly in the soft, black, loamy soil. Presently
she nosed out some little round objects covered with a dark skin, and
pushed one over to me. Never have I eaten anything more delectable than
my first truffle. I can find them myself now as well as anyone.

Other fungi too were plentiful after that rain. Some grew under the
trees, some on rotten logs, others out in the open. Some were good to
eat—better even than mushrooms—but others were poisonous. Mother never
passed a new one without showing us which were fit to eat and which were
not. There was a brilliant scarlet kind which she warned us against
strongly; well I remember how she scolded me one day because just for
fun I pulled one up, and stuck it stalk down in a fork of a tree. I did
not repeat the experiment, for it left a bad taste in my mouth for hours
afterwards.

About this time my coat began to change. Squirrels that are born early
in the spring have fur of a greyish-brown hue very like the coats that
old squirrels put on in winter, but we, being June kittens, had summer
suits of red-brown without any ear tufts, or any hair on the palms of
our hands. First, my tail changed and grew darker, much heavier and
more bushy. It turned to a blackish-brown, quite different from its
previous bright chestnut-red hue. My coat, too, began, but more slowly,
to lose its ruddy tint, and to assume its winter colouring. I became dark
brownish-red on the head and back. My white under parts changed to grey,
which spread along my sides. It also grew longer, softer and warmer, and
my ear tufts began to show. During the summer a squirrel has but a few
hairs on the points of the ears, but winter brings a thick tuft a full
inch in length.

We squirrels have a strange peculiarity. We are the only living
creatures, so far as I know, who change our coats twice a year and our
tails once only. As I have said, we change our coats in spring and again
before the cold weather, but our tails once only—in autumn. A healthy
squirrel looks at his best in late September and early October, for at
that time his new brush is extremely bright, while his new grey-brown
coat is rich and long. Both fade during the cold weather, the fur
especially becoming during long frosts of a yellowish rusty hue. There
are, I believe, some squirrels, near relatives of our own, living in
Canada, who turn almost white in winter. But as—luckily for ourselves—all
we squirrels have the sense to sleep away most of the cold weather, we
have not the same need to conceal ourselves by assuming the colour of the
snow, as have Arctic hares and foxes and many other animals which are
obliged to work and forage for a living during the hard weather.

But I was talking about the good times we had that autumn and the various
delicacies we used to hunt. After the rain which brought such a crop of
mushrooms, we had a week of wonderfully warm, soft, hazy weather, but
then the wind switched round into the east, and for the first time in my
life I understood what cold was. It blew bitterly, with a hard grey sky,
and the trees being still full of leaves, the noise of the gale through
the coppice was one long roar, the great boughs swaying, creaking, and
complaining bitterly. Very glad we were, when night fell, to snuggle
all four close together in the hollow in the beech hole which mother had
selected as our abode after the destruction of our second nest! It was
a very convenient residence, considering that it was a ready-made one.
Some winter storm of years long past had torn away a large branch at its
junction with the trunk, and rain and weather had rotted the scar till at
last a hollow was left large enough to hold a dozen of us. Once it had
been full of water, but a green woodpecker boring its nest in the trunk
below, the moisture had drained away through the rotten fibres, and now
it was dry as a bone, and formed as convenient and comfortable a retreat
as any dreyless family of squirrels could possibly desire.

The gale lasted two whole days and nights, and then it cleared and left
a hard blue sky from which the small white flecks of wind-cloud vanished
one by one, and on the fourth morning we woke to find the grass white
with hoar frost and a keen tang in the air which filled us with a wild
delight in the mere fact of being alive. Rusty, Hazel and I sallied forth
and tore round and round like three mad things, flinging ourselves from
bough to bough, rattling up and down the huge trunk and wide-spreading
branches, playing all manner of practical jokes on one another.

Mother watched us indulgently, but when, quite out of breath, we at last
came back to her, she announced that the time had arrived to begin the
collection of our winter stores.

‘Now that you have no father,’ she said, ‘you must help me in the work,
for remember there is nothing worse than to be caught by bad weather
unprepared, and without many stores of food.’

That was the first real work that I ever did. It seemed odd, when we
reached the nut bushes at the edge of the coppice, not to choose the
plumpest nuts, and sit and eat them on the spot. I think, indeed, that
we all began by doing so, and mother did not interfere until we had each
had a good breakfast; but afterwards she kept us steadily to work. I
am afraid that we needed a good deal of superintendence to keep us up
to the mark, but mother set us such a good example that we were shamed
into doing our best. At first I was under the impression that we were to
carry all the nuts back to our beech-tree home, but mother laughed when I
suggested this, and told me that it was quite unnecessary to do anything
of the kind. After looking about a little, she chose a long hollow under
a gnarled old blackthorn trunk at the bottom of the hedge, and here,
and in other similar cavities, we stored a goodly supply. Towards noon
mother told us that that was enough for the day, and while she and Hazel
went back home, Rusty and I decided to go for a little round on our own
account.

Working down the hedge, we came upon a patch of thick brambles from which
the blackberries were falling from over-ripeness. A greedy cock pheasant
below was simply stuffing himself with the fallen berries and those near
the ground. For a joke Rusty crept up quietly, and then, making a sudden
bound, alighted almost on the handsome bird’s head. Off he went with
a terrific whirr and flutter across the big meadow, and Rusty, with a
malicious gleam in his eyes, sprang back to my side.

Presently we found ourselves at the coppice gate, and instinctively
I stopped and gazed across the meadow towards the Hall. The wind had
brought many leaves down, and the long, low, red-brick building with its
steep tiled roofs, stood strongly outlined behind the thinning fringe of
its oaks and elms.

I don’t know whether it was the keen, brisk air, or what, but suddenly
the idea came to me to visit the old place once more, and on the spur of
the moment I suggested it to Rusty.

For a moment my brother looked blank. Adventurous as he was, the idea
of crossing more than a quarter of a mile of open grass land rather
staggered him. You know we squirrels will make journeys of any length
provided we can travel through the tree tops, and so long as a tree is
handy we have no objection to short trips across country from one to
another; but none of us care about open ground. We can run at a good
speed for a short distance, but there is no cover in grass. There we are
absolutely at the mercy of any hungry hawk, while weasels have a nasty
trick of popping out suddenly from rabbit earths or drains. Then, too,
there is no escape from the gun or rabbit rifle of any pot-hunting man or
boy, while poaching dogs or cats are another source of really desperate
peril.

However, Rusty was not the sort to think twice of danger, or to be
outdared by the brother whom he had secretly despised as a ‘tame’
squirrel. I saw his teeth set and a sudden sparkle in his eye.

‘All right,’ he remarked, and that was all. He was out of the hedge and
over the ditch before me, and leading the way at a great pace across the
pasture.

We did not keep to the path, but made off to the left, where an irregular
fringe of trees grew along inside the hedge which cut off the pasture
from the road leading between the Hall and the village. Great luck
attended us. Beyond a few rabbits we saw no sign of life, and when we
got close enough to the trees to take refuge if any danger approached I
breathed more freely, and I feel sure that Rusty was equally relieved.
Racing along among the rustling dead leaves, we crossed the brook near
the culvert under the road. The rivulet was so small that it was no
trouble to jump. Then we found ourselves in the park, and here we had
to take to the open again. The fine clumps of timber which dotted it
here and there were our islands of refuge, and we ran from one to the
other, the same good fortune attending us during our whole journey. From
the last tree we steered for the kitchen-garden wall, and keeping along
the bottom of this, reached the sunk fence. Once up this, and I was on
familiar ground.

A long narrow plantation of Kentish cob-nuts bordered the wall which
divided the kitchen-garden from the lawns, and in this we were soon
snugly ensconced.

‘My teeth! Did you ever see such nuts?’ exclaimed Rusty, staring in
wide-eyed amazement at the great russet-coloured cobs which hung in
profusion among the brilliantly tinted leaves.

‘Oh yes, I’ve eaten lots of them,’ replied I, with conscious superiority.
‘Try them. They’re uncommon good.’

Rusty needed no second bidding, but set to work, and cutting the tip off
one of the largest nuts, was soon discussing its fat, white kernel with
a gusto which proved that he thoroughly agreed with me in my estimate of
the quality of cobs. I joined in, and we made a most delicious luncheon.
From where we sat the lawn and part of the house were in full sight, and
all the time I kept a watch fill eye upon the clump of evergreens where I
had been used to play, in the hope that I might see the familiar figure
of my dear master in his rough tweeds, and his cap on the back of his
head, sauntering across the lawn.

Alas! there was no sign of him nor of any of the Fortescues. Had I known
it, half the length of England separated me from the nearest of my old
friends. After a time, however, some one did stroll out upon the terrace
walk. He was a complete stranger—a short, fat man, with red cheeks and
mutton-chop whiskers. He wore a grey bowler, tipped far back upon his
head, his thumbs were stuck in the armholes of his gaudy waistcoat, and
a long, black cigar was held between his thick lips. He was gazing round
him with a complacent air of proprietorship which in some indefinable
fashion annoyed me intensely.

Suddenly he took the cigar from his lips and shouted loudly, ‘Simpson!’ A
man with a bill-hook in his hand came hurrying round from the shrubbery
behind the house.

The stout man pointed to Jack’s and my pet clump of evergreens. ‘Those
shrubs are untidy, Simpson. They want clipping up. Get to work on ’em at
once!’ And, to my horror and disgust, Simpson began chopping and carving
away at the deodars and arbor vitæ, lopping all the boughs up a man’s
height from the ground, and turning the pretty shrubs into the stiff,
unnatural likeness of the toy trees in Jack’s youngest brother’s Noah’s
Ark.

Then, as I looked about me, I began to see that many things had been
changed. The laurels were cut close and flat; a number of fine limbs had
been sawn from the elms; several new beds of weird pattern had been cut
in the splendid century-old turf of the lawn; the gravel paths were all
fresh swept; everything had a painfully overtidy appearance.

Presently one of the drawing-room French windows was pushed open, and
a third person appeared on the scene—a boy about Jack’s age, but how
strangely different! He was short, like the elder man, and had the
appearance of having but just stepped out of a band-box. His cord
riding-breeches were as immaculate as his white cuffs and tall white
collar; his brown boots quite gleamed in the autumn sun, and he wore new
dogskin gloves. Strolling over towards his father, he began to talk, but
we were too far away to hear what they said. After a short time they both
turned and came across the lawn towards the kitchen-garden door.

‘I say, Scud, hadn’t we better hook it?’ suggested Rusty. But I was so
interested in these new people, who seemed to have usurped the place of
my dear Fortescues, that foolishly I replied:

‘No; they’re not coming near us. Keep still, and they’ll never see us.’

The pair had nearly reached the garden door when I heard the boy exclaim
something, and they changed the direction of their walk in the direction
of the hazels. A swish of bent branches shortly followed.

The distance from the garden door down to the angle of the garden wall
was not more than thirty yards, and I knew very well that, thick as
the bushes were, there was not a ghost of a chance of our remaining
undetected if they came poking about in this fashion.

‘Come on, Rusty!’ I muttered, and we at once made off as quietly as we
could. Unluckily for us, while the stout man was poking his head among
the branches, puffing and blowing as he did so like a broken-winded
horse, the boy had walked on down the path, and next moment his shrill
voice rang out:

‘I say, father, here are two beastly squirrels stealing nuts. Keep an eye
on ’em while I get my gun.’

He was off across the grass at a pace one would not have credited him
with, and we, aware that any attempt at further concealment was useless,
went off also at top speed.

What we both dreaded was the long open space at the bottom of the
kitchen-garden wall, where it abutted on the park. However, there was no
shirking it. If we stayed where we were we would be caught like rats in a
trap. It was Rusty who made the jump first out of the bushes and down the
sunk fence, and as I followed him I heard the fat man shouting hoarsely:
‘Quick, they’re running away!’

How we scuttled! Even a terrier would have had his work cut out to catch
us. There was no cover at all until we reached the far end of the long
line of wall, and we strained every nerve to gain the hedge which ran
at right angles from the end of it, separating the park from the road.
The distance was not much more than seventy yards, but it seemed like
a mile as we tore along. Fresh shouts behind us spurred us to almost
super-squirrel efforts. Hardly five yards were left when suddenly—bang,
and a sound like hail pattering on the ground behind us. Next second, and
with simultaneous bounds we were in the hedge, but before we could get
through it and into shelter on the far side the sound of another shot
rang through the calm autumn air, and this time with better aim. Leaves
flew in the hedge, and a sharp blow on the head sent me staggering,
nearly causing me to lose my foothold.

‘Come on, Scud. We must cross the road,’ called Rusty at that moment;
and with a fine jump he was across the ditch and out on the white, dusty
surface.

Recovering myself, I followed, and found that, though my head was
singing, I could still run as well as ever.

Luckily there was not a soul in sight, so we crossed the road in safety,
plunged through the opposite hedge, and found ourselves in a plantation
of young larches about twenty feet high. Through these we went as hard
as ever we could pelt, until, quite exhausted, we came to rest somewhere
in the thickest depths, and, climbing into one of the largest trees, lay
panting and tired out on an upper bough. For a minute neither of us could
move; then suddenly Rusty, glancing at me, exclaimed:

‘Why, Scud, you’re hurt!’

‘Yes, something hit me,’ I answered faintly.

In a moment the good fellow was licking my wounded head. A pellet of
shot, it seemed, had glanced along my skull, cutting the skin and going
right through one of my ears. The wound bled a good deal, but it was not
a serious one, and after I had got my breath back, and after my heart
had ceased thumping as though it would burst, I felt very little the
worse, and announced that I was quite ready to start home. But Rusty,
more cautious, refused to move.

‘That fellow with the gun may be waiting in the road for us,’ he said.
‘Much better stay here a bit. The shadows are still short, and we shall
have plenty of light for our journey home.’

His advice seemed good, so we waited where we were for an hour or more.
My wound stopped bleeding, but my head was very sore. It was not,
however, so badly hurt as my feelings. That I should have been shot at
and nearly killed in the garden of the Hall seemed beyond belief, and
what made it worse was that I had impressed on Rusty over and over again
that whatever the dangers in our coppice, the Hall grounds, at any rate,
were a safe refuge. One thing I was deeply grateful for—that he had not
been harmed. With all the intensity of my squirrel nature I hated the
intruders who had put the insult upon me. How I longed that Jack might
have been there to take vengeance on our persecutors!

[Illustration: CLIMBING INTO ONE OF THE LARGEST TREES, WE LAY PANTING AND
TIRED OUT.]

Rusty, good fellow that he was, forebore to add to my self-reproaches by
any remarks about what had happened. When I made some sort of apology
for bringing him into trouble, he merely smiled, and, licking his lips,
said:

‘I shan’t forget those nuts in a hurry. Wouldn’t mother like a few of
them!’

At last, when the shadows were beginning to lengthen towards the east, we
made a move. Under Rusty’s direction we worked back very quietly through
the plantation to the edge of the road, and took a careful survey from
the top of the tallest tree. All was still, the only sounds that broke
the quiet of the windless autumn afternoon being the scrape of Simpson’s
saw as he lopped away branches from the Hall trees, and the distant
‘Gee!’ and ‘Haw!’ of a ploughman at work in a field to the right of the
larch plantation.

We crossed the road again, and resolved that though the distance was
considerably greater, we would stick to the hedge all the way, and not
trust ourselves again to the open grass. Fortunately for our peace of
mind, the road along the side of which we were forced to travel was quite
deserted, and, keeping as much as possible in the centre of the hedge,
we slipped along at best pace. Of course, it was not by any means easy
travelling, for in places the quickset was so thick and close that we
were forced to take to the ground for short distances. Ground near a
hedge is always most dangerous, for an old hedgerow, especially one with
high banks either of earth or stone, is the chosen home of the stoat and
the weasel, and both these bloodthirsty little terrors are quite as much
at home among the branches of a thick hedge as even a squirrel.

More than half of our journey was covered in safety, and when we reached
and crossed the brook we began to feel as though we were almost home.
But we were not to escape without further adventure. A little way past
the brook, just as we were nearing the timber which I have mentioned as
running in an irregular row along the inside of this part of the hedge,
there came a piece of holly so thick and close-cropped as to be quite
impenetrable except very close to the ground. It would really have been
wiser to have cut out across the field to the nearest of the trees, but
we had had such a scare that we shirked the open. Rusty, leading as
before, had got half-way through the holly, when I saw him stop short,
and then, with a little warning cry, make a quick bound upwards into
the thickest heart of the holly. At the same moment the tangled ivy
which covered the bank below became alive with little beady eyes and
snake-like, sinuous forms. We had run right into a whole pack of weasels
hunting together, as is their custom on autumn afternoons.

I was after him like a flash, but the brutes had seen us, and came
swarming up the close-set stems, hard at our heels. Under ordinary
circumstances we could have cleared them in half a dozen bounds, but here
we were at a shocking disadvantage. Above our heads the holly was like
a wall, and it was all we could do to force our way through the stiff,
glistening, dark-green leaves. I remember plunging along desperately,
almost mad with fright, my eyes half-shut to protect them from the sharp
prickles, and my nostrils full of the horrible, musky odour of our eager
pursuers.

Then suddenly I was out of the darkness and on the top of the hedge,
scratched, breathless, my wounded ear bleeding again. But where was
Rusty? I could not see him, and a horrible fear almost numbed me. Just
in front the branches were shaking, but it was too thick to see what
was happening below. Anxiety overcoming terror, I made a dive forward
into the tangle from which I had just escaped with much difficulty, and
almost as I did so there came Rusty’s head out of the thicket. His eyes
were bright with fright, and he dragged himself forward slowly, as if
something were pulling him back. Instantly I saw that a weasel had him
by the tail, its sharp teeth buried in the thick, long hairs. Without
thinking twice, I plunged down and snapped with all my might at the
fierce brute’s head. My long front teeth sank deep into the back of his
neck, and I felt them grate on his skull. His jaws opened and he fell
backwards, knocking over the next of the pack in his fall.

Relieved of the weight, Rusty shot upwards, and with half a dozen
tremendous bounds was out of danger. As I followed him, a third weasel
gained the top of the hedge, and, throwing its long body high into the
air, like a snake in the act of striking, tried its best to seize me. I
heard its needle-like, white teeth snap and caught a glimpse of its red
eyes gleaming fiercely; but I was too quick for it, and, as it fell back
disappointed, I was off in Rusty’s wake at a speed that defied pursuit.
Regardless of concealment, we tore along the top of the hedge until level
with the trees, then, turning off to the left, reached the timber, and so
from tree to tree towards the coppice.

The sun was just setting when two worn-out, scratched, frightened, and
very disreputable-looking squirrels reached the old beech and made
humble confession to their mother of all that had happened to them
during that adventurous day, and, after a thorough good scolding, were
at last forgiven and permitted to sup on beech-mast and curl up with the
rest of their family snug in the heart of the great beech trunk.

After this day I found that Rusty treated me with far more consideration
than he had ever shown before. He dropped his jeers about ‘tame’
squirrels, and showed in his silent way that he was pleased to have my
company in his wanderings abroad. I forgot to say that, though his brush
looked a little lopsided for a time, the hair soon grew again, while my
wound healed rapidly; but I still have a small hole through the left ear
where the shot passed, to remind me of my narrow escape.

For the next few weeks mother kept us very busy, helping her to collect
winter stores. These consisted almost entirely of hazel-nuts, acorns, and
beech-mast, all of which were very plentiful. We made small hoards in
many different places, a very necessary precaution, for if—to use Jack’s
expression—we were to put all our eggs in one basket, we should stand a
very good chance of starving in hard weather. There are plenty of thieves
in the woods. Rats and mice are the worst—absolutely conscienceless,
both of them. Then there are the nut-hatches, who have a wonderful trick
of ferreting out nuts hidden in holes in timber. Again, snow may cover a
ground-hoard too deep to reach it, or even hide it altogether, so that
it is impossible to find it at all. People who abuse us, because we
occasionally do a little pruning among the tips of the evergreens, should
remember that we are the greatest planters in the country. I suppose
that quite one in three of the ancient oaks that England is so proud of
have sprung from acorns hidden by squirrels in autumn, and either lost
or not needed during the winter. So, too, have countless beech-trees and
nut-bushes, and not a few pines and firs into the bargain.

As we worked at our stores we often met others of our race intent upon
similar business. The nuts of our coppice were famous for a long way
round, and were so plentiful that there was enough for fifty families if
they cared to come for them. We enjoyed seeing these visitors, and had
great games with them.

And so day by day, as the leaves fell and the night frosts became more
frequent and more sharp, we worked and played and generally enjoyed life
quite undisturbed by any outside interference.




CHAPTER VII

THE GREY TERROR


Gales and cold rain prevailing, we spent much of our time indoors, while
the wind roared through the coppice, and clouds of dead leaves whirled
through the air, settling in rustling drifts in every hollow. The bracken
was long ago brown and dead, but the blackberry leaves, though purpled by
the frost, still clung with their accustomed obstinacy to the stalks, and
provided thick cover for the pheasants. The old beech-trees were nearly
bare, and, indeed, all the trees except the evergreens, especially those
on the west side of the wood, had lost their leaves; only the oaks had
foliage still to boast of, and most of this was brown and withered.

But it was only November, and we young ones had as yet no idea of
retiring for the winter. On fine days, especially when frost was in the
air, we were as frisky as ever, and had magnificent games among the heaps
of dead leaves. It was the greatest fun possible to take running headers
from the long, bare tips of the beech boughs, falling on the soft,
elastic cushion of leaves, in which one completely disappeared, just as
a water-rat does in a pond. Under the leaves the ground was still thick
with ripe beech-mast, so there was no need as yet to infringe upon our
winter stores. There were pine-cones, too, by way of change, and fallen
hazel-nuts, though these were getting scarce now that not only we but our
distant cousins, the dormice, had been getting in winter stores.

Our own preparations for winter were quite complete. The last piece of
work had been to line our home thoroughly with dry moss, and partially
to stop up the entrance which had been so large that, when the wind blew
that way, it made cold draughts whistle round inside. For this work we
young ones collected the material while mother did the building, and
Rusty and I gathered useful hints for the future.

All these days, when the air was still, or the wind blew from the
direction of the Hall, we could hear in the distance the clink, clink
of axes—a novel sound in this country-side, where the Squire and his
forebears before him had had the true Englishman’s love of timber,
and thought not twice but many times before cutting down a single
tree. But for a long time our solitude was not invaded, except by a
few school-children picking late blackberries or nuts, or a labourer
returning from his work along the wood-path. Then, one fine morning early
in November, when Rusty and I were having our usual morning scramble,
the sharp report of a gun sent us skurrying to the nearest refuge, which
happened to be a tall fir-tree not far from the coppice gate. Bang
again!—this time closer. Rusty looked out but dodged back with great
rapidity. He intimated to me that the young murderer from the Hall had
appeared and that he, Rusty, didn’t mean to move until he disappeared.

Bang again! A cock pheasant came whirring up past us, rocketing high over
the tops of the trees, and a second dose of shot, hopelessly too late,
sent a shower of twigs scattering from the tree just over our heads, and
made us cower the closer against the trunk.

Steps came trampling past beneath us, and the firing became fast and
furious. Every living thing took cover, or, if it had wings, departed
as fast as they would carry it. The racket did not last long, and, as
we found out later, the bag was not a large one. The Hall’s new tenants
were not good shots, and their new keeper, who had supplanted old Crump,
did not know his business. As soon as the noise had died away we made
the best of our way home, and found mother and Hazel, who had been lying
close at home, extremely relieved to see us safe back once more.

Several times again before the winter the solitude of our coppice was
invaded by the same party—the little stout man with the mutton-chop
whiskers, his white-collared, pasty-faced son, and a tall keeper with a
ginger beard. But after their first two visits none of the coppice people
paid much attention to them beyond sitting tight in cover. The very
pheasants—stupid fellows as they are—made jeering remarks about their
inability to kill anything unless it happened to be fool enough to sit
still to be fired at.

What did cause much more serious alarm was the rumour of a new and
most dangerous enemy. The news came to us through a strange squirrel
whom Rusty and I met one cold bright morning rummaging among the deep
beech-leaves for a breakfast of mast. The poor fellow had a nasty wound
at the back of his neck, and looked thin and miserable. He was so nervous
that when he heard us coming he bolted wildly up a tree. We called to
him, and, looking rather ashamed of himself, he came back and met us.

‘What’s up?’ inquired I. ‘We’re not going to eat you. Come down and
finish your breakfast.’

‘Ugh! don’t talk of eating!’ he answered in trembling tones. ‘You
wouldn’t if you’d been so nearly eaten as I was three days ago;’ and he
showed us his wound.

‘Weasel?’ Rusty asked.

‘No—much worse.’

‘What, not a fox?’

‘I’m not quite fool enough to sit on the ground and let a fox catch me,’
retorted the stranger. ‘It was a wild-cat.’

‘Wild-cat!’ exclaimed I. ‘Why, I’d no idea there were any left in these
parts!’

‘No more had I,’ put in Rusty. ‘Mother says that a very old squirrel once
told her that his father had seen a wild-cat, but that’s ever so many
years ago. There are none left now.’

‘None left!’ returned the other angrily. ‘Very well; all I say is, wait.
Your turn will come.’

He was clearing out in a huff when I stopped him.

‘Wait a minute. I want to hear all about it. Anyone can see you’ve been
badly mauled. Come with us up into our beech-tree, and I’ll find you a
better breakfast than this half-rotten stuff; then you can tell us all
about it.’

After a little more persuasion, he cooled down and accompanied us, and
we all heard his story. It appeared that a week before he and one of his
brothers had visited a Spanish chestnut they knew of at some distance
from their home, which was in a large wood about a mile away, when,
without the slightest warning, a great cat had sprung out of a patch
of dead bracken close by, and with two quick swings of her terrible
paws bowled them both over. Our new acquaintance owed his life to the
fact that he had seen the enemy coming just in time to duck, and,
consequently, had received the full force of the blow upon his neck
instead of his head. But even so he had been stunned, and had recovered
his senses only in time to see the savage beast running rapidly away
among the underbrush with the dead body of his brother swinging limp
between her powerful jaws. Knowing that she would come back for him, he
had summoned all his remaining energies, and succeeded in climbing into
a pollard oak and hiding in a knot-hole in its spreading top. From there
he watched the robber return, moving noiselessly across the dead grass
and leaves on velvet-cushioned paws; noted the grey coat, stiff and
coarse, the short tail, broad head, and small, close-rounded ears; had
seen her search snuffing among the dead leaves, moving round and round
in impatient circles, and shivered in his terror. But fortune was good
to him, for after a time, which seemed endless, the cat, tired of her
vain search, had at last turned, and with tail straight up padded softly
back the way she had come. But it was not until nearly sunset that the
wounded squirrel had made shift to crawl home, sore and aching, and there
he had lain for two whole days. Alas! the tale of his sorrows was not yet
told. On the third day his mother went out about midday to bring in some
food, and never came back! Towards evening his father had gone to search
for her, and returned at dark with the terrible tidings that the same
stealthy fiend had captured her too. He had found some gnawed bones and
her brush—that was all!

By this time the whole wood was in a state of panic. Rabbits, pheasants,
and squirrels, all had suffered alike. The cat, it was said, was only one
of a family who had taken up their abode in an immense hollow hornbeam
in the centre of the wood. A regular reign of terror set in, and our
new friend, whose name was Cob, together with his father and his sister,
the only survivors of the family, had decided to emigrate before worse
happened.

We were all very sorry for the unfortunates. A worse time for squirrels
to emigrate could hardly be imagined, for, of course, they had been
forced to abandon all their winter stores and their nest, which had been
strengthened against the cold weather. It was now too late in the season
to collect a proper provision, and they stood a very good chance of
starving if the winter should turn out a severe one. You will understand
that we young ones, who had never yet been through a winter, were not
able to realize quite how serious the misfortune was; but mother, who had
seen the snows of three years, thoroughly comprehended the situation,
and at once bade Rusty and myself do all we could to assist the unlucky
family. Next morning we paid a visit to their temporary quarters, a
large untidy hole in a hollow oak, and after first showing them where
the last few nuts were to be found in the ditch below the hazel-bushes,
set to work to discover better quarters for them. Of course, by this
time we knew our coppice from end to end. There was not a tree we were
not familiar with from root to topmost branch. But after a good deal of
consideration and discussion, we decided that the best refuge was another
hole lower down in our own tree. It was one that mother had thought of
seriously, after father’s death, as a residence for ourselves, but had
decided against as being rather too small. However, we found on making
a thorough examination that the wood on one side of it was so rotten
that it could easily be dug out, and then the hollow would be amply
large enough to accommodate the three wanderers. They, on their part,
were devoutly grateful for the trouble we had taken on their behalf, and
thanked us most cordially. Cob’s sister, whose name was Sable, a little,
dark-furred creature, quite touched me by her shyly-expressed gratitude.

Autumn was now far advanced, and we had had several very sharp frosts.
Except for the oaks, to which their dead, dry leaves still clung,
the trees were bare. Rusty and I took our morning exercise among the
denser foliage of the evergreen firs and larches, of which there were
fortunately a good number in our coppice. I say fortunately because,
where these trees are handy a squirrel need never starve even in the
hardest weather. Not that squirrels are given to starving. Unless owing
to some quite unforeseen and unusual accident we are as well able to
fend for ourselves even in the hardest winters as any inhabitants of the
woodland.

The migrant birds had all left long ago, and the woods were quieter
than of old. Not that there was not plenty of life remaining. The
wood-pigeons still pecked among the beech leaves for mast; great tits
and tomtits moved restlessly among the branches of our beech; flights of
long-tail tits talked softly in the tops of the evergreens. Finches of
many kinds—greenfinch, chaffinch, bullfinch, and even a few hawfinches,
feasted on the hawthorn berries which hung thickly on the bare hedges,
and began to take their toll of the fast-reddening holly. The privet
and mountain-ash berries were gone long ago. These form the pet dessert
of bird life, and are always cleaned up almost before they are ripe.
So, too, was the sticky scarlet fruit of three gnarled old yews which
stood in a little group all by themselves just beyond the rabbit-warren
where the ground sloped towards the brook. Thrushes and blackbirds still
visited their’ dark recesses, but more from habit than for any other
reason.

Redwings and fieldfares fed in small flocks across the open ground, and
shared with the starlings and rooks the insect food of which they are
so fond. The grass, no longer green but browned at the tips by frost and
sodden from lack of sun, had ceased to grow, and feed was becoming short.
I noticed that the cattle had taken to the higher ground instead of
feeding along the brook; and that in the mornings when the frost-dew hung
thick on the meadows, they wandered along the hedgerows, picking drier
mouthfuls from the bank.

Some of our acquaintances had already retired for the winter. The
hedgehogs were no longer to be seen making leisurely progress along the
hedge-banks; they had all gone to sleep deep in leaf-lined crevices
under the blackthorn roots; the dormice had followed their example, and
curled themselves up for the winter in their delicately woven globes of
grass and fibre. Mr. Dormouse is a heavier sleeper than we are, yet not
above rousing for a square meal if the sun comes out warm and bright on a
January morning. Snakes, slow-worms and lizards had all disappeared long
ago, and would not move again for more than four months. I had not seen a
bat for a fortnight, and I fancy the last of them had joined his comrades
hung up in the church-tower or in Farmer Martin’s thatched barn, stiff
and motionless like dead game in the Hall larder.

Field-mice showed when the sun came out, dodging about on the surface
of the dead leaves, apparently very busy, and yet never appearing to
accomplish anything in particular. But they would soon follow most of the
four-legged denizens of the coppice into winter-quarters, and leave the
bare woods to the birds, the rabbits, and the cunning, hungry fox.

Of the wild-cat, the terror of the neighbouring wood, we heard nothing
at all; and though I often talked of her with Cob and his sister, we did
not imagine that there was much chance of her raiding so far from home.
Cob gradually recovered from his wound, and, as food was still fairly
plentiful, he grew fat and strong again.

Nothing occurred to disturb the even tenor of those last few days before
winter set in in earnest; and the silence that reigned in the coppice
was broken only by the cheery song of the robin, the low twitter of the
tits, and occasionally the clear pipe of the missel-thrush. Then came a
day when the wind turned to the north-east, and a new biting, penetrating
chill filled the bleak air.

For the first time in my experience mother absolutely refused to leave
the nest.

‘Children,’ she said drowsily, ‘it’s going to snow. I feel it in my
bones. Close the door with moss and let us sleep.’

Pushing a bunch of moss into the opening, she curled herself into the
deepest, darkest corner of our snug retreat, and almost instantly fell
into a sleep deeper than ever we had seen or dreamed of. Squirrels, you
must know, are never still for more than a few minutes at a time in their
ordinary sleep. I know that, whenever I wake at night, and that is very
often, especially now that I am no longer young, some of my family are
always moving their legs, twitching about like a dog that lies before
the fire and hunts rabbits in its dreams. But this was a different
thing, this sleep of mother’s—she lay like a dead thing on her side,
her splendid brush curled round and over her, and, as we watched, her
breathing seemed to slow until it became almost imperceptible.

We, too, felt strangely drowsy; but yet, with all the curiosity of youth,
would not yield to it, so anxious were we to see this snow of which we
had heard so often. The wind whistled in stronger and stronger gusts,
making weird wailing sounds among the bare branches; the sky, already
one uniform mass of greyish cloud, grew duller and thicker, while up to
windward a darkness like that of the winter twilight began to cover the
land. Rusty and I, peering out through a small hole in the moss, saw
the great trees bending and swaying in the increasing blast, while the
dead leaves raised by the wind rustled and rattled in brown clouds along
the ground below. Then suddenly, and as if by magic, the whole air was
swarming with little white atoms, which whirled and fluttered silently
in a mad dance. Thicker and thicker they came till the sky was blotted
out, and even the trees close by were nearly hidden behind the waving
white veil. All along the eastern edges of the beech-tree limbs lines of
pure white appeared and grew, while the dry leaves below stopped their
rustling as they vanished, hidden beneath a carpet whiter than fallen
hawthorn petals. To us, who had never seen the like before, it was a
wonderful sight, and we gazed and gazed as if we should never tire. But
gradually the drowsiness of the snow-sleep came upon us and mastered us,
and, whether we would or no, closed our eyes. Rusty slipped limply back,
and lay like a dead thing beside the quiet forms of Hazel and my mother.
I remember vaguely pushing back the plug of moss into position, and then
I, too, fell back and sank away into a long, delicious, dreamless slumber.

       *       *       *       *       *

It may have been a day, or a week, or, for all I know, a month before I
woke again. My sleep had been so deep that for a full minute I was quite
unable to realize where I was or what had happened, and I lay contentedly
still in that pleasant, dreamy state between sleep and wakefulness. Then
my eye was caught by a tiny brilliant sunbeam, which, striking through
some minute interstice in the mossy door, made a little path of golden
light in which little motes of dust danced gaily across our hollow
retreat.

Slowly recollection returned, and with it a feeling of perfectly ravenous
hunger. Struggling up out of the deep hollow in my mossy bed into which
I had sunk, I stretched, yawned, and, looking round, saw Rusty with one
eye open gazing at me with a drowsy, puzzled expression. Mother and Hazel
were still wrapped in deepest sleep.

I barked to wake Rusty; but he only blinked at me without speaking, until
at last I leant over and nipped his ear. That woke him.

‘Weasel take you, Scud!’ he growled, starting up. ‘Your teeth are sharp.’

I told him I was simply starving.

‘Come to think of it, so am I,’ he said, stretching and yawning in his
turn. ‘Let’s go and get some grub.’

‘Hadn’t we better wake mother and Hazel?’ I suggested. But Rusty thought
not, since they were so sound asleep. Standing up on my hind-legs, I
pulled away the plug of moss that closed the entrance, and sprang out,
with Rusty close at my heels. What a sight met our eyes! Even hunger was
forgotten in amazement. The rays of the morning sun shining from a sky of
clearest, palest blue were reflected back from one universal dazzle of
white. Below us the ground was an even plain of snow, which had covered
up and hidden grass, dead fern, fallen branches, ant and mole heaps—all
the irregularities to which our eyes were accustomed—under its deep
smooth carpet. From the bare branches of the beeches and oaks the snow
had melted and fallen away, but the evergreen boughs still bent under
heavy loads, from which in places long, transparent icicles drooped. It
was freezing hard, for the surface of the snow sparkled with crystals of
ice, which shone more brilliantly even than dewdrops in the slanting
rays. No breath of air stirred under the cloudless heavens, and the wood
had a new stillness which was almost awe-inspiring.

But, oh, the air! Cold as it was, it had a dry tingle which set the
blood fairly racing in our veins, and every moment increased our already
ravenous hunger. Recovering from our amazement at the strange novelty of
all around us, we bounded off together, intent on a store of beech-mast
which lay beneath a twisted root of our own old beech.

It was a queer sensation, that first landing upon the snow. So hard
frozen was it that our light weights made no impression upon it
whatsoever. You would have needed the skill of a fox to find our tracks.
Rusty was the first to reach the spot where we had made our store.

‘Snakes’ eyes and adders’ tongues!’ he exclaimed—Rusty was sadly given to
the use of bad language—‘this white stuff has covered it all up, and I’m
hungry enough to eat a sprouting acorn.’

‘Dig, you duffer!’ I answered him, and together we set to work, our sharp
claws sending the crisp snow flying in clouds behind us. Suddenly the
crust gave way, and we both tumbled through, one on top of the other,
into a good sized hollow beneath. At first Rusty was much annoyed,
considering it all my fault. However, as soon as he discovered that we
were actually on top of our larder, he recovered, and began with all
speed to scratch out the mast from the nooks and corners in which it had
been stored.

Some people will tell you that a squirrel never hides two nuts in the
same place, but this is not quite the fact. As I have said before, we all
have a very natural objection to piling a whole score of nuts or other
provender together in one place; for then, if any marauder does come
along, he naturally gets the whole lot. But it must not be imagined that
a separate hiding-place is made for each single nut or acorn. No; when we
discover a good place for a larder, such as the hollow I am now speaking
of, we often put quite a quantity of food into it, poking each separate
morsel into a different crack or corner.

That was a royal feast. I am quite certain that neither Rusty nor I had
ever been so hungry before in the whole of our short lives; and this
makes me suspect that we had been asleep for at least a fortnight, or
possibly more. At last Rusty, after a vain rummage in the furthest
corner of the hollow, turned on me:

‘You greedy pig, Scud, you’ve eaten the last bit of mast!’

‘Well, you are a good one!’ I retorted, laughing. ‘I don’t mind betting
you a chestnut that you’ve eaten more than me.’

‘Anyhow, there’s nothing left here,’ replied Rusty in a very aggrieved
tone. ‘At this rate our stores won’t last long.’

‘There is any amount left,’ I told him, ‘and it seems to me that
travelling is safer and better than ever. We’ll go round and hunt up some
of those hazel-nuts under the hedge next time.’

‘All very well if this weather lasts,’ grumbled my brother, who always
loved a grievance. ‘But suppose it melts. Mother said it often did. Then
the grass will be all wet and beastly, and the ditch probably full of
water. Or suppose more snow falls; then everything will be covered up.’

‘’Pon my fur, you’re as bad as a frog!’ I retorted. ‘Never was such
a squirrel to croak. Come along out of this dark hole. I want some
exercise.’

As we crawled out a bark hailed us from above, and there was Cob sitting
out on a low branch over our heads.

‘I say, you fellows,’ he cried, ‘this is jolly, isn’t it?

‘Ripping!’ I answered. ‘Have you had a feed?’

‘Yes, I’ve had some mast; but we haven’t much, so I thought of going over
to the fir-trees and looking for some cones.’

‘Right you are. We’ll come too. I’m still hungry enough to eat the most
turpentiny cone in the coppice.’

So the three of us scuttled off across the crisp surface, and after
satisfying ourselves with pine-kernels and a little of the inner bark
from the branch tips by way of dessert, proceeded to rouse the wood with
a thorough good scamper. We had the whole place quite to ourselves except
for the birds. The wood-pigeons seemed as cheerful as usual, and the tits
were busy pecking along the branches. But I must say I felt sorry for the
robins, the thrushes, and blackbirds, and most of the other feathered
creatures. The poor things seemed to have no life left in them. They sat
huddled up in the sunshine with their feathers all fluffed out, till they
looked twice as big as usual, but evidently they were all pretty hungry.
Birds, you know, do not suffer much from cold directly, but when there
is hard frost, and especially when frozen snow covers the ground, they
have to go on very short commons. Those that feed on the grubs that
live in tree trunks do well enough, and, of course, the sparrows and
finches visit the rick and farm yards, and so provide for themselves. It
is the berry and worm-eating birds who are worst off in weather of this
kind. The hips and haws do not last long, and in really severe frost the
holly berries also disappear, leaving only such untempting food as the
hard dark ivy berries. Worse than all is the lack of water, and I fancy
as many birds perish from thirst during a long frost as from all other
causes put together.

When the low sun began to drop towards the west the cold increased, and
we three hurried home and went to sleep again. But a day or two later the
same brilliant sun called us again, and this time we resolved to pay our
promised visit to the hedge by the hazel bushes, where we had buried the
first of our nuts. At our special request Cob accompanied us. He, good
fellow, as I discovered, was half-starving himself, in order to keep a
supply for his sister and father, in case they woke up, so I consulted
Rusty, and we agreed that we would take him with us and stand him a good
feed out of our nut-store.

When we reached the place, we found, much to our disgust, that the ditch
was quite full of snow, which had drifted in from the field. There was
nothing for it but to begin a regular quarrying job, and very hard work
we found it. Cob worked like a mole, and but for his useful assistance
we should hardly have succeeded in reaching the treasure stored beneath
the old thorn stump. As it was, we must have been digging fully two hours
before we at last hit upon the right spot, and what with the keen air
and the hard work we were pretty sharp-set by the time the plump brown
beauties were unearthed.

‘Great water rats!’ exclaimed Rusty, driving his strong front teeth
through the glossy shell of his first nut, and jerking away the pieces
with quick, hungry tugs. ‘This is fine! All the sun and none of the wind.
Just the place for a good feed and a rest.’

‘All the same, I hate being on the ground,’ said Cob, uneasily glancing
round at the steep walls of snow which surrounded the little white pit
which we had dug, and at the bottom of which we sat feasting.

Rusty uttered a disdainful snort.

‘What’s to hurt us here? A weasel wouldn’t trust himself in this dazzle
of snow, and foxes don’t prowl in the daytime, let alone in a sun like
this.’

‘Oh, I know it’s foolish,’ answered Cob humbly. ‘But I’ve been that way
ever since the time that I had that escape from——’

His voice died away in a sharp choking gasp. Looking round in some
surprise, I saw him staring upwards, a frozen horror in his wide eyes.
Following his glance, I saw glaring down upon us through the hedge two
cruel green orbs set in a wide grey face. It did not need the short ears,
the stiff whiskers, or the rows of sharp white teeth, bared in a hungry
grin, to tell me that I was looking upon the terror of the woods, the
wild-cat of Merton Spinney.

The awful head was hardly a yard away. Its owner had crawled up unseen
on the far side of the hedge—that is, inside the coppice, for we were in
the ditch outside—and having got wind of us, was endeavouring to creep
through unseen and unheard, so as to pounce upon us unawares. It was the
lucky chance of our having Cob with us, whose hearing was acute beyond
either Rusty’s or my own, that gave us that needful second’s warning.
Without it there is no possible doubt but that I should never have been
alive to tell this story.

One often says ‘quick as a cat,’ but it would be just as correct or more
so to say ‘quick as a squirrel’; and I am quite certain that hardly half
a second elapsed between the moment I set eyes on the cat’s head emerging
from the briers and the bound which landed me six feet out of the hole
along the ditch to the left. With the best intentions in the world no
one of us could have helped the others, but would only have sacrificed
his life uselessly if he had tried to. Thinking over the matter since,
I have often wondered why the cat did not pounce straight upon Cob, who
has confessed that he was so badly frightened that he never jumped until
both Rusty and I were clear out of the hole. The fact remains that she
did not do so. A rustle of quickly moved branches, and then a series of
soft, padding sounds behind me, proved that I had been selected as her
dinner—an attention which, as you may imagine, I could very well have
dispensed with.

[Illustration: TWO CRUEL GREEN ORBS SET IN A WIDE GREY FACE.]

I was badly frightened—there is no use denying it—but I did succeed in
keeping my wits about me. In the open, of course, I was no match for
her. Her springs were of tremendous length, far greater than mine, for
a cat—like all her tribe—can travel at tremendous speed for a short
distance. Aware of this, I turned sharp back through the hedge to my
right—only just in time, for her cruel teeth snapped not an inch from my
brush as I dived through the heart of the hedge. Being smaller than she,
I gained a few yards in the passage through the close-set branches, and
tore off across the frozen snow at top speed towards the nearest tree.
There was no time to pick or choose; I had to take the first that came,
and here luck was against me, for it was a tall but slender birch which
happened to stand some little distance apart, the nearest tree to it
being a beech some fifty feet away.

Up I went with a rush, again missing death by a sort of miracle, for my
enemy launched herself at me like a shot from a catapult, striking the
bark not the length of my body below my brush. She clung there a moment,
and then fell back with a baffled snarl, and for a moment I thought
she had given it up. But I suppose she was very hungry, or perhaps too
enraged at her first failure to abandon the chase, for the next moment
she drew off a few yards, and, coming at the tree with a rush, clattered
up it, her sharp talons ringing against the rough bark.

Naturally my first impulse was to run out towards the beech and jump into
it. Could I have done this I should have been safe, for the cat would
have had to return to the ground in order to reach the beech-tree. But
when I gained the outer end of the birch branch I found to my horror that
the gap was full three yards—a terrible jump to risk at any time, but
almost certainly fatal if I missed my footing, for before I could recover
myself the hungry brute would most infallibly have leaped down upon me.

Now I was in a tight place indeed, for already the lithe, grey form of my
cruel foe was stealing out along the branch to which I clung, her heavier
body causing it to sway and vibrate beneath me. It seemed as though I
must take the jump, and chance it. Suddenly I noticed that the cat had
stopped. She was lying close along the branch, her hungry eyes glaring at
me, her pink tongue slowly licking her lips. It was clear that she was
afraid that if she came further the bough would not bear her weight.

This gave me a moment’s breathing-space, time to glance round and see
if any other avenue of escape was open. At once I noticed another birch
bough to my left, and a little higher, but still within fairly easy
distance; and on the impulse I sprang, landing full upon it. At this the
cat, with another blood-curdling snarl, turned quickly back towards the
trunk, but before she could reach it I was off into the very topmost
twigs of the birch. Here I felt sure that I was safe, at any rate for the
time, for I did not believe the cat would venture so high. To my horror
she set herself to follow, and, taking such risks as I never dreamed she
would dare, she came slowly but stealthily on my track. All I could do
was to crawl out to the thinnest tip that would bear me, cling there, and
wait.

With horrible pertinacity she followed to the very top of the trunk, and,
stationing herself in the last fork that would bear her, crouched there,
apparently determined to wait and starve me out.

I was at my wits’ end, for there seemed no possible avenue of escape.
I might remain where I was, you will say, and trust to tiring her out.
True; but supposing she refused to be tired out? Remember, it was
freezing hard. She could endure the cold; I could not. Sooner or later
my muscles would grow numb, and I should fall either on to the ground
or right into her jaws. Another thing (I may as well confess it), I
was frightened—so badly frightened that this in itself was actually
paralysing my powers. After a few minutes I began to feel as though some
unexplainable impulse was forcing me to turn and gaze into those fierce
green eyes. I had sense enough to be aware that, once I did this, it was
all up. I should become fascinated, and drop right into the cruel jaws
that waited so hungrily below.

Against this suicidal impulse I fought with all my might, but in spite of
my best efforts it grew upon me until I began to feel that I could endure
the torture no longer. It seemed as though it would be a relief to put
an end to it, even if it meant ending my life at the same time. The cat
seemed to know this, too, and lay below me, stretched at full length,
still as the leafless branch on which she crouched.

I was actually turning; in another second I should have yielded as weakly
as a miserable house mouse, when suddenly a sharp bark resounded from the
beech-tree near by. The cat stirred, and for the moment I was saved.

I looked in the direction of the sound. There was Rusty only a few yards
away in the beech. Cob was close behind him. Rusty cried out to me
sharply:

‘Do you see that bough-tip straight below you?’

‘Yes,’ I answered dully.

‘Can you drop to it?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Don’t be a fool! You’ve done much bigger things than that. Here’s our
plan: We’ll start barking at the cat and take her attention off you while
you drop. It’s a possible jump from the bough below across to this tree,
and you’ll have plenty of time, for the cat will have to climb down the
trunk. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I replied faintly.

I had been in such a queer dazed condition that I had never even noticed
the possible avenue of escape which Rusty pointed out. Looking down, it
seemed a perfectly terrific drop. Indeed, it was something like twenty
feet, and if I missed it there was another thirty to the frozen snow
beneath.

‘Are you ready?’ came Rusty’s voice, sharp and threatening.

‘Yes,’ I said again.

A chorus of perfectly frantic barks and squeaks broke out at once. I
heard my enemy move uneasily, and, summoning all my courage, I let myself
go and dropped.

I struck the branch beneath, fair and square. Alas! its twigs were thin,
elastic, and slippery with frozen snow. A wild grasp with all four paws
failed to stop me. Down I went to the ground below.

Oddly enough, this was where my luck turned. If I had fallen on to the
hard frozen surface I should almost certainly have been too stunned to
move at once. As it was, I alighted on a spot where only a thin coating
of powdery snow covered a deep soft cushion of dead leaves. Before the
cat was half-way down the birch trunk I was in the beech-tree.

Rusty and Cob were awaiting me.

‘Good squirrel, Scud!’ cried my brother, in tones of such warm praise as
absolutely astonished me, for I was intensely ashamed of myself for my
cowardice, and for having had such a tumble.

However, there was no time to waste. With Rusty leading, we were away
through the beech into the next tree, and so across the coppice at full
speed. The cat, lashing her tail with rage, followed for a while across
the snow beneath, and once or twice started climbing again after us.
But we were most careful to keep in the thickest part of the wood, and
whenever she climbed we merely jumped to the next tree. Soon she tired of
this—for her—unprofitable pursuit, and stole softly away.

Not until we had watched her out of the coppice and away along the hedges
in the direction of Merton Spinney did we venture to return to our
respective homes, where we shut ourselves up snugly and went to sleep
again.




CHAPTER VIII

I FIND A WIFE


After the coming of the grey terror you may imagine how careful we
were. We took no more risks of any kind, and when we went out for food
invariably took the precaution first to post a sentinel in the nearest
tall tree to give good notice of danger. The cat came no more, but all
the same, this precaution in all probability saved the lives of Rusty and
myself. The snow had lasted a long time, but as the weather was sunny
and bright we were out most days. One morning, as my brother and I were
hunting out some nuts in the centre of a thick part of the hedge, we
heard Cob’s cry of warning from an oak near by. Neither of us had any
idea from which direction the danger was approaching, but we both were
at the top of the hedge in the twinkling of an eye. Only just in time,
for almost as we left the ground a gaunt red beast bounded on to the
very spot which we had left. He was so close that I distinctly heard
his sharp teeth click together like the snapping of a steel trap. He
looked up with a hungry gleam in his eyes, but quickly recognizing that
he had missed his meal, Master Reynard wasted no time in vain regrets,
and trotting sharply off down along the hedge, soon disappeared in the
distance. A fox is not particular in snowy weather. All is nuts that
comes to his hungry maw.

Yet we were fated to hear once more of our deadliest foe. The snow had
gone; cold rain and heavy gales succeeded it, and then one day dawned so
mild and soft and sunshiny that even mother and Hazel woke.

‘Come, children,’ said mother; ‘we will go and get some breakfast. Open
the door, Scud.’

I was in the very act of doing so, when the heavy report of a gun at some
distance made us all jump back. A minute later there was a rattle of
heavy claws up the trunk of our beech-tree. The sound was unmistakable.

‘The cat!’ I muttered; and we all sank back shivering with fright.

Right past our closed door came the sound, and up into the boughs above.
We could only crouch as still as four mice. If the grey terror found
the nest—and her keen nose would tell her that quickly enough—we were
absolutely at her mercy.

‘Shall we make a bolt for it?’ muttered Rusty in my ear.

‘What’s the good? She’s above us. She’d be certain to get one of us
before we could clear,’ I answered.

All was quiet again, but our suspense was almost unendurable. Ha! what
was that? I could distinctly hear heavy footsteps on the ground below.
They seemed to be circling round the base of the tree. Then they stopped,
and absolute silence reigned.

Crash! A tremendously heavy report, followed by an unearthly scream.
Bump, bump! Something was falling from bough to bough above; then a heavy
thud.

‘Ha! ye poaching rascal!’ came a voice from beneath.

Curiosity could be restrained no longer, and, lifting the moss a little,
I poked my nose through. I could have barked for sheer joy, for there
was the tall, ginger-whiskered keeper in the very act of picking up a
blood-stained grey form which lay limp and lifeless on the dead leaves at
the foot of the tree. The grey terror was no more!

Nothing worth chronicling happened during the rest of that winter. Early
March, I remember, was cold out of the common, so we did not emerge from
our winter home until later than usual. At last the frost departed,
and one morning I woke up, and, instead of waiting as usual for Rusty,
sallied out alone. It was exquisitely bright and sunny, with a soft
feeling in the air. A gentle westerly breeze stirred the twigs, all red
at the tips with new buds, and drove across the blue sky soft rolls of
light, smoky cloud. Tiny spikes of green were pushing out through the
withered tufts of last year’s grass, and the birds were singing as I had
never heard them sing before.

As I ran along the lowest branch of the beech, whom should I meet quite
suddenly but Cob’s sister, little Sable. She looked at me in her pretty
shy way, murmuring a gentle ‘Good morning,’ and it suddenly occurred
to me how extremely pretty she was. I wondered vaguely why I had never
before noticed the dainty grace of her shape, the softness of her coat,
and the jewel-like brilliancy of her eyes. We sat still, gazing at one
another for quite a minute; and then suddenly, with a roguish flick of
her brush, she bounded past me and away to another branch, where she
stopped short and looked back over her shoulder with a mischievous
twinkle in her eyes. After her I dashed in full pursuit, but she was gone
again before I could reach her.

In those days I rather fancied myself at running and jumping, but I don’t
mind saying that I never had a harder chase to catch any squirrel in my
life. She was so extraordinarily quick at dodging and turning that we
were both quite out of breath when at last I came up with her.

That was the beginning of my courting of my dear wife, but I can tell you
that I had no easy task before me. She was the most coquettish little
thing, and just when I was beginning to whisper tender speeches in her
pretty pointed ears, off she would go with a flick and a spring, and
lead me such a dance that I would angrily declare to myself that she
did not care a bit for me. You see, I was very young in those days, and
not learned in the ways of the fair sex. At other times she would hide
herself in some cleft or knot-hole, and leave me to search for her by the
hour; then, when at last I found her, she would say with an air of the
greatest surprise:

‘Were you looking for me, Scud? Oh, I didn’t know. What a pity!’

There was worse to follow. One fine morning, some days later, Sable
actually consented to come and play down on the grass. We were enjoying
a fine game when, all of a sudden, a strange squirrel, one I had hardly
seen before—he came from a family who lived quite at the other end of the
coppice—appeared on the scene, and, running up to my lady as coolly as
you please—

‘Good morning, Sable,’ he said, without so much as looking at me. ‘Won’t
you come up to the fir-trees? I know where there are some specially
tender shoots.’

This was a little too much for me.

‘Who in hazel-nuts are you?’ I inquired, coming up with my brush straight
over my head and all my teeth showing. The beggar pretended not to see
me, and began talking to Sable again. Well, if he didn’t see me he felt
me, and pretty quickly, too. I went for him on the spot, rolled him
over, and got my front teeth well home in his ear. For a minute it was
hammer and tongs. We whirled round and round, the fur flying in every
direction. He was strong, and snapped viciously, but I never let go, and
though he marked me once, the end of it was that he was only too glad to
break away and run. I chased him for some distance, and then came back,
only to find that Sable had calmly gone home. I was so cross with her
that I left her alone for the rest of that day, sulking by myself up in
the fir-trees. What made it worse was that Rusty came and laughed at me
mercilessly.

‘You don’t catch _me_ playing the fool like that,’ he jeered. ‘A bachelor
life’s good enough for me, thank you.’

Next day Sable was as sweet as sugar, and we agreed to be married and set
up house together.

The next great question was the location of our future home. During the
past winter I had seen so plainly how great were the advantages of a hole
in a trunk that I quite determined to find similar quarters. As I have
said before, I knew the coppice from end to end, and it struck me that
there was a beech-tree not far from the gate which might suit us. So off
we went to have a look at it.

On the way we noticed two squirrels fighting savagely on the ground, with
a third sitting demurely by, and watching the combat. I had seen half a
dozen such fights in the past few days, and did not pay much attention,
but Sable suddenly stopped and sat up straight.

‘Don’t you see who it is, Scud?’ she exclaimed, intensely amused.

I looked again, and to my utter astonishment, who should the topmost of
the two be but my brother Rusty.

‘My whiskers, but I’m sorry for the other!’ I laughed.

Rusty was a terrific fighter, and, indeed, we had not long to wait before
his rival broke and ran for dear life, Rusty after him.

Everything went well that happy day. We found a hole high up in the
beech-tree bole which, with a little hollowing out, made a simply perfect
residence. It was close under a large branch, which gave splendid
protection from the weather. We wasted no time in setting to work, and
by evening had scraped out enough of its rotten sides to make a chamber
about nine inches each way. Next day we lined it with dry leaves and grey
moss, which we stripped from the lower part of the trunk.

But our labours were by no means at an end. Squirrels are rarely content
with one residence, and my experience, short as it had been, had made me
plainly understand the advantage of having several. Crossing over into
a larch on the opposite side of the path, we built a drey on a large
flat bough at a good height above the ground. This was all of selected
sticks, and was well roofed in. It had a hollow floor and a conical roof,
the sticks composing the roof being carefully interlaced in order to
keep out the rain. It had an entrance on the east side and a bolt-hole
on the west, and to close the doors at night, or in cold weather, we
provided plenty of moss and soft grass fibre to make stoppers. The only
incident of note during these pleasant days was my getting a horrid
fright through accidentally digging up a slow-worm which had not yet
left its winter-quarters in the hedge bank where I was pulling up grass
roots. Ever since my adventure with the viper I have had a perfect horror
of snakes. Not, of course, that a slow-worm is a snake, or in any way
dangerous, but still, it looks detestably like one.

It seemed odd at first, only two of us in our new home, instead of
the four who had snuggled together during the long winter in the old
beech-tree. But we were far too busy to be dull, and we often saw mother
and the rest of our relations. Mother was very pleased with our match,
and equally so with the two others in our family, for not only had Rusty
found a wife, but Cob and my sister Hazel had set up housekeeping
together.

It used to amuse me, the air of proprietorship which Sable exhibited in
our tree. I really believe that she considered the whole of it belonged
to her, root, trunk, and branch. Any stranger squirrel who ventured to
intrude had a bad time indeed. He or she was promptly chased off the
premises without any ceremony whatever.

It was one day in April that our four babies were born. Ugly little
beasts, I called them, quite hairless, blind and helpless. But when I
ventured to remark as much to my wife there was a regular upset. You
might hardly believe it, but she turned me out neck and crop, and for
the next few days I never ventured home for more than a few minutes at a
time. It was difficult even to persuade Sable to leave the little beggars
long enough to take her meals. Early spring is none too easy a time
for squirrels to find food in any case, and we were forced to subsist
principally on the young shoots and bark of pine and fir trees. It is
this habit which gets us such a bad name with keepers and foresters, but
we do not do half so much damage as we are credited with.

One day, when I was out alone foraging, I met Rusty looking very fat and
happy.

‘Hulloa, Scud,’ he said. ‘You’re getting thin. Cares of matrimony, eh?’

‘They don’t appear to worry you very much, anyhow,’ I retorted. ‘How do
you keep so fat?’

‘Oh, I find plenty of food,’ he answered lightly; but there was a sort of
guilty air about him which puzzled me at the time.

A day or two later, when I caught him devouring a nestful of the little
blue eggs of the hedge-sparrow, I understood.

Now, eating eggs is a thing which is considered by well-bred squirrels
to be thoroughly bad form; but, after all, it was no business of mine.
Rusty was old enough to take his own course, so I said nothing about it.
I have often blamed myself since, for one bad habit leads to another; and
no doubt my brother’s indulgence in eggs that spring was the first step
which led to the sad end which afterwards befell him.

To return to my own affairs—our kittens grew with astonishing rapidity,
and once they opened their eyes began to prove decidedly more
interesting. They were three bucks and a doe. In a month they were half
as big as myself, and their hair had grown to quite a respectable length.
Being April kittens, their coats were entirely different from the one
which I had worn during my first summer. Mine had been reddish-brown, and
I had had no tufts on my ears, but our young ones had greyish-brown coats
like the winter one which I was just beginning to discard, and they wore
smart little tufts on each ear as well as hair on their palms. One of
them, however, was much darker than the other three.

Sable was the best of mothers, and took the greatest care of her young
family, keeping them beautifully neat and clean. Before long they grew
big enough to be taken out of the nest, and then began a very busy time
for their mother and myself. Jumping and climbing lessons were the order
of the day. Remembering how well my mother had instructed me, I took the
greatest pains to show them how to spring from one branch to another, how
to swing by one hand or foot, to fall without hurting themselves, and how
to hide instantly when any danger approached. Sometimes we took them down
on to the turf below, which was always kept close cropped by the rabbits,
and the children enjoyed nothing better than rolling about there,
tumbling head over heels, and indulging in all kinds of wild antics.

It amused me to see how inquisitive they all were. Curiosity is, of
course, the besetting sin of the whole of our tribe, and many a one of us
has it brought to grief. Anything the least bit out of the way had to be
examined at once, and no amount of reproof ever seemed to restrain them.
Curiosity very nearly cost Walnut—for so I called the little dark chap,
who was my special favourite—his life.

One morning I had been over to the other end of the coppice, to a
horse-chestnut tree which I knew of. Young horse-chestnut buds, I may
remark, make as good a breakfast as almost anything I know of. When I
came back I found Sable running about on the ground in a most distracted
fashion. So soon as she caught sight of me she came flying to tell me
that Walnut was missing. She was so excited that I had some difficulty
at first in making out the facts of the case. It appeared that she had
had the whole family out for a game on the grassy sward which bordered
the wood path when, all of a sudden, she became conscious that only three
of them were in sight. Walnut had completely disappeared. The others
explained that they had been playing hide and seek, and that Walnut had
been hiding. They had looked everywhere for him, but could neither find
nor hear him.

Sending them all three back home out of mischief, their mother had set to
work to make a vigorous search, but after half an hour’s hard hunting,
had found no sign of her missing son. I joined her; and we began to
quarter out the ground systematically, she taking one side of the path,
I the other. But not so much as a hair of Walnut’s brush could we see;
and when the shadows had nearly reached their shortest, I began to feel
almost certain that some prowling weasel had caught our poor son. At
last it occurred to me that the adventurous young rascal might have gone
through the hedge into the open field, and I myself crossed the hedge
and ditch. I think I have mentioned before that near the coppice gate on
the meadow side was a strip of sandy ground with patches of hawthorn,
blackberry bushes, and gorse, which was riddled with rabbit holes. As I
wandered sadly across this, occasionally stopping to give a slight bark
or a stamp, I suddenly heard a distinct reply. In great delight I hurried
forward to a thick clump of gorse from which the sound seemed to come.
But when I reached the spot there was no sign of life. I stamped again,
and this time there was no doubt whatever about the answer. But it came
from underground! Then I knew what had happened. Walnut had evidently
tumbled into a rabbit-earth and was unable to get out. Very soon I found
the hole, and there, sure enough, in the darkness some feet below me I
saw my son’s eyes.

The burrow was a wide and very steep one, and its sides were of extremely
soft and loose sand. It was quite plain that Walnut, having once fallen
in, could get no footing to jump or scramble out; indeed, so he told me
in tones that shook with fatigue and fright.

I called up Sable at once, and she, clever creature that she is,
suggested that the best thing to do was to throw down pieces of grass and
stick in order to give Walnut a footing from which he might jump. It was
a long operation, but we finished it at last, and our foolish son once
more emerged to the light of day.

‘How, in the name of pine-cones, did you ever come to get into such a
place?’ was my first angry question.

‘I saw something white sticking out of it, father,’ he replied very
coolly, ‘and I wanted to find out what it was.’

I burst out laughing.

‘Haven’t you ever seen a rabbit’s scut before?’

Walnut looked rather foolish.

‘I suppose I have,’ he answered, ‘but it didn’t strike me at the time.’

Things went very quietly and peacefully during the early part of
that summer. There were no human intruders whatever. As I found out
afterwards, the new people at the Hall had stopped all the old footpaths,
including the field-path which led to the coppice gate. They had great
ideas on the subject of high-farming and high-preserving, but for
the present we luckily lived in comparative ignorance of these. One
or two things certainly seemed strange. Almost all the hedges in the
neighbourhood had been cut down and pleached during the winter, making
the country-side look singularly bare. Also several grass fields had been
ploughed up and planted with roots or wheat.

The ginger-haired keeper and a boy—his son, I believe—were often in the
coppice, messing about among the undergrowth and collecting whole baskets
full of pheasants’ eggs. Mother was horrified at this performance, but,
as we found out later, they took them to the Hall to be hatched in
incubators. I have spoken of the amount of timber-cutting which went on
around the Hall. One day in the early spring a number of men invaded the
coppice and cut away the underbrush and tree branches, so as to make
several open rides across the wood from end to end. We were annoyed to
see so many good hazel-bushes destroyed, but as they did not cut down the
heavy timber we were not particularly inconvenienced.

We owed that ginger-whiskered keeper a debt of gratitude for slaying our
enemy, the grey cat, but some of his performances no self-respecting
coppice-dweller could approve of. He began to set horrible gins and
snares in every direction. So far as killing off the stoats and weasels
went, this was all very well; but it was a sad and dreadful thing to
see an unlucky brown owl, the foe of nothing except mice and such-like
vermin, struggling miserably half the night in the foul jaws of a
pole-trap, with both its legs broken. Jays and magpies suffered also. I
had seen traps at the Hall, and took particular pains to point them out
to my youngsters as objects to be avoided with the utmost care. Other
young families were not so fortunate. One of Rusty’s promising sons was
missed one day, and found by his mother with his head crushed between
cruel iron teeth, stone dead. There is nothing in the world so barbarous
as the steel-spring trap.

That spring and all the early summer were extraordinarily dry. The
hay-crop was very short, but of excellent quality, while the grain
was curiously dwarfed. Many of the flowers came out before their time,
particularly the white convolvulus and the purple scabious. The brook
in the field, I remember, ran altogether dry, and failed to fill a
large excavation which the new tenant of the Hall had had dug with the
intention of making a fish-pond. I went to look at it one day, and found
it a bare expanse of red clay, netted all over with deep cracks, in
the largest and dampest of which a few small, unhappy frogs had found
precarious refuge.

Mother told us that she had never seen weather like it before, and shook
her head a good deal, prophesying that food would be as scanty during the
coming autumn as it had been plentiful the previous year. Certainly there
seemed good ground for her forebodings, for the oaks had hardly set any
acorns, and there was little sign of mast upon the beech-trees. It looked
as though the birds, also, would be likely to suffer, for the hips and
haws dropped before setting from the drought, the hollies and yews had no
berries, and the blackberry crop seemed as though it would be a complete
failure.

Towards the end of July we had a spell of intense heat. We all took up
our abode in our summer drey, opening both doors in order to let the
draught, when there was any, blow through, and never stirred out except
in the early morning and late evening. We felt the heat severely; but,
after all, were far better off than the ground creatures. The grass in
the meadows outside the gate had turned quite brown, and the unlucky
rabbits were forced to travel long distances to find grazing.

There are few things, by the bye, which a rabbit dislikes more greatly
than venturing any considerable distance from his home. The poor young
ones paid a heavy toll to the stoats and weasels during that famine-time,
for the vermin had them at their mercy when the little chaps visited the
hedgerows to look for a little greenstuff.

The birds ceased singing almost completely, and the only place where much
bird-life was still to be seen in our neighbourhood was around the pool
down at the end of the coppice. This was almost dry, but a few square
yards of stagnant, shallow water still remained in the centre, surrounded
by a wide space of mud dotted all over with the footprints of dozens of
different species of birds, and not a few four-legged creatures as well.

It must have been about the twelfth day of the heat, which turned out
the most sultry I ever experienced in my life. The sun rose crimson in
a crimson sky. No breath of air was abroad, and the leaves hung down
straight without a flicker of movement. The coppice was uncannily silent,
a silence broken only by the hum of insects, which rose drowsily through
the foliage; the only moving things were butterflies, flaunting on
painted wings, and a few lizards and snakes—reptiles for which no weather
seems too hot.

All six of us lay out on the branches under the thickest shade we could
find, tongues lolling out, too listless to trouble about food or even to
talk. As the afternoon drew on, and the shadows lengthened towards the
east, I suggested to Sable that we should go off in search of supper. I
mentioned an oat-field just across the road, where I had an idea that the
grain would be ripe enough to provide an easily-won meal.

But Sable said no; that it was still too hot for the children. That I had
better go alone. If the oats were really ripe, we would all journey there
next morning for breakfast. I never argue with my wife. My first week of
wedded life taught me that such a proceeding is an entire waste of time
and energy. So answering, ‘Very well, my dear,’ I rose, stretching and
yawning lazily, and went leisurely away towards my destination. After
all, Sable was quite right When I reached the open, the sun still stung
with hardly abated power, and the heat mist shimmered over the baking
ground.

The oat-field had turned quite golden in the past few days, but it was
pitiful to see how short was the straw, how light the heads, and how
small the grain. I had it all to myself, and wandered about, picking
out the heaviest heads and nibbling in leisurely fashion. Suddenly a
low distant mutter of thunder boomed through the stagnant air, and it
struck me that it might be wise to make for home. But before I could
even reach the hedge there sounded a second and louder peal, and to my
amazement a quarter of the northern sky was already swallowed by a huge
mass of vapour, purplish-black in colour, and rimmed with a tumbling
edge of boiling mist white as snow. The cloud was advancing with amazing
rapidity, and as I sprang into a pollard oak at the corner of the hedge,
to get a better view, it swallowed up the sun, and a sudden darkness fell
upon the thirsty land. Then I saw that the deep bosom of the ponderous
storm-cloud was laced by constant streaks of blue and silver fire.
Such a sight is not seen once in a generation of squirrels, and it so
deeply interested me that for the moment I entirely forgot my intention
of returning home, and sat there watching the gathering tempest with
fascinated eyes.

A great tongue of blue flame licked downwards, and a moment later the
thunder crashed in real earnest. There was a hoarse murmur in the
far distance, and I saw the tree-tops, fields away across the level
country-side, bend their tall heads as the first gust struck them.
Presently a breath of air, cold, damp, and delicious, ruffled my fur,
and, as the lightning flared again through the gloom, the first drop of
rain, the size of a wren’s egg, struck me full in the face.

With a sudden start I realized that it was now too late to dream of
returning, and that, if I wished to avoid the worst ducking of my life,
I must seek shelter of some kind. Racing round the club-like top of the
pollard I discovered a knot hole just large enough to hold me, and into
this I forced my way—barely in time, for almost instantaneously the full
force of the tempest was upon me. One gust of wind, so fierce that I felt
the sturdy old oak quiver to its very roots, then a smashing downpour of
hail. Not ordinary hail, but lumps of ice as large as walnuts, which
almost instantaneously levelled the field of oats flat with the ground,
stripped the foliage from the trees, and danced into white drifts which
lay inches deep against the hedge bank.

In between the hail clouds pennons of blue and white electric fire sprang
and vanished; but the clamour of the pounding ice and the roar of the
wind almost drowned the bellowing thunder. Closer and closer glared the
lightning. The hail turned to rain, which fell in solid sheets. The sharp
alternations between darkness and intense white light dazzled me so
greatly that I could hardly see. I felt stunned, deafened, and horribly
frightened.

Of a sudden the rain ceased absolutely. Instantly the whole world was
bathed in white fire, and simultaneously the very heavens seemed to crack
with a crash that, I think, actually stunned me for the moment. When I
came to myself again it was raining almost as fiercely as ever. Flash and
crash still followed for some minutes with hardly abated rapidity and
intensity, but very soon it began to grow lighter. The storm, like most
such, was of small area, and travelling so rapidly that it passed almost
as quickly as it had come.

[Illustration: DOWN THE NEAR SIDE OF THE TRUNK WAS A DEEP AND WIDE NEW
SCAR]

‘My poor Sable!’ I thought as I started hurriedly homewards. ‘What a
terrible fright she and the kittens will have had!’ As I crossed the road
into the coppice signs of the storm were everywhere visible. The ground
was covered with green leaves, among which the fast-melting hail-drifts
gleamed oddly white. Every puddle brimmed, every branch dripped, and from
the meadow below the voice of the swollen brook rose hoarsely.

I made along the hedge, crossed into the coppice trees, and rattled
rapidly homewards among the soaking foliage. A slight smoke rising in
the distance startled me, but it was without the slightest premonition
of coming misfortune that I quickened my pace, uttering a slight bark to
signal my approach.

There was no reply, and the last part of my way I covered at full speed.
Reaching the nearest side of the path, I stopped, stared, staggered, and
nearly lost my hold. It was from our own beech-tree that the smoke was
rising. The ground below was strewn with white fragments of splintered
wood. Down the near side of the trunk was a deep and wide new scar,
blackened in the centre.

Shaking and trembling all over, I crept up. But, no, I cannot tell you
what I saw. They had all taken refuge in the nest, and their death must
have been mercifully instantaneous.




CHAPTER IX

WAR DECLARED AGAINST OUR RACE


I think the shock of the disaster which robbed me at one fell swoop of
wife, family, and home must have so completely stunned all my faculties
that for a time I was unable to realize fully what had happened. I
vaguely remember wandering round and about the still faintly-steaming
ruins of the beech-tree, and calling piteously for Sable. Lucky for me
that no enemy came near. Even a boy with a catapult could have made an
easy prey of me, for all my senses were strangely dulled.

What first brought me to myself again was a low but familiar call which
came from a small larch near by. Looking up, I could hardly believe my
eyes when I caught sight of a small dark squirrel crouching on a branch
at no great height from the ground shivering piteously.

‘Walnut!’ I exclaimed in absolute amazement.

I had felt so certain that the poor charred remains in my broken home
comprised the whole of my family. Was it possible that one of them had
escaped, after all?

The poor little chap was so shockingly frightened that it was a long
time before he could give me any clear account of how he had escaped. It
appears that when my poor Sable saw the storm coming she at once set to
work to take her family from the summer drey in the larch back to the
hollow in the beech-trunk. She had been afraid, Walnut said, that the
wind might blow the drey away. The jump across the path from tree to tree
being too much for the youngsters, their mother had led the way down to
the ground, ordering them all to follow her closely. Walnut, however, who
had never seen a thunderstorm, and who, of course, did not realize the
danger, thought it would be a fine joke to remain behind. In the hurry
of the moment Sable, no doubt, never noticed until too late that he was
not with the others, and when the storm broke the darkness at once became
almost impenetrable.

When the hail began, Walnut, terrified almost out of his senses, wished
most devoutly that he had not been such a fool, for great lumps of ice
beat through the roof of the drey, and the tree swayed so frightfully
that he expected every moment the whole nest would be torn away and sent
flying in fragments to the ground. However, it was too late for useful
repentance, so he was forced to stay where he was. Then came the final
fearful crash, and he remembered nothing more until he found himself
clinging desperately to a bough a long way below the drey. When the
weather cleared a little he had gone across to the beech-tree, but the
smoke frightened him so that he had not dared to climb.

That night we two spent amid the dripping ruins in the larch. After the
great heat the night breeze struck bitter cold, and we lay chilled and
shivering, though too miserable to care much one way or the other. As
soon as ever it grew light we left that part of the coppice for ever.
I took my son to the extreme opposite end of the wood, and there had
the good luck to stumble almost immediately upon possible quarters.
These were in a vast oak, the boughs of which were beginning to decay
from sheer old age. In the end of one branch, broken short off by some
long past gale, was a deep hole which had evidently been formerly the
habitation of a pair of stock-doves, for the remains of their nest were
mouldering just inside the entrance. I had no spirit to build new
quarters, so with sore hearts we took possession of this shelter. Later,
when I recovered my energies a little, I collected moss to line it, and
made a dry and fairly comfortable residence.

Of the time that followed I will not speak. But for Walnut I should not
have cared to live. As it was, I hardly took the trouble to eat, but sat
and moped from day to day, until I grew thin and bony; my coat stared,
and I looked like an old squirrel.

But time cures all sorrows, and happily for us, just as a squirrel’s life
is shorter than a man’s, so much the more rapidly do his griefs pass
away. Walnut grew from day to day, and became a strong, handsome fellow,
well able to take care of himself. I was very proud and fond of him, and
gradually his bright companionship did me good, and amid new scenes I
began slowly to take a fresh interest in life.

Our new home was very near to the far end of the wood path, close to
the other gate, which opened on to the road; the same road which ran
past the Hall, across the brook, to the village beyond. As I have, I
think, mentioned before, the new people at the Hall had closed this
path, padlocked the gates, and posted notices forbidding anyone from
using the short cut. This course caused intense dissatisfaction among
the villagers, and more than once I saw a passing labourer shake his
fist in silent anger as he tramped along the dusty road past the locked,
iron-spiked gate.

It was not long before we began to realize the reason of this proceeding.
One day the ginger-whiskered keeper appeared outside the gate with a cart
loaded with coops. Unlocking the gate, he and another man carried in
the coops one by one. All our curiosity aroused, Walnut and I followed
cautiously, and watched them lay the coops down in an open glade, not far
from our oak tree, open them, and let loose dozens of young pheasants,
which scuttled about without attempting to fly, tame as so many barn-door
fowls. Next came a proceeding which interested me far more. Taking two
bags from the cart, the keeper proceeded to scatter a quantity of Indian
corn and other food about in the grass, then, picking up the coops, he
departed.

So soon as ever they were gone, down swooped Walnut and myself, and,
sending the frightened young pheasants scuttling in every direction,
set to work on the corn. It was nearly a year since I had tasted this
delicacy, which Jack Fortescue used to give me as a treat in the old,
quiet days at the Hall. The food was a godsend to us, for, as I have
said, the supply of nuts, mast, and acorns, was of the shortest in our
neighbourhood that season. I let my mother know, and she as well as
Cob and my sister and their young ones were very soon on the spot. The
pheasants got precious little of that meal, or of many subsequent ones
which the keeper carefully brought day by day. However, they were not
much to be pitied, for the supply of ants’ eggs was plentiful all over
the coppice, and pheasants do better on ants’ eggs than on almost any
artificial food they can be given.

I noticed that Rusty never troubled to come down to the pheasant food,
though his wife and family of three sturdy sons regularly attended our
daily free feed. I had my own suspicions, and these were confirmed when
his wife told me that he was often away for whole days together. When
she remonstrated with him he only laughed, and this made her seriously
uneasy. Rusty had grown to be the largest and most powerful squirrel that
I have ever seen in my life. No other in the wood could have stood up to
him for a minute. He was also astonishingly brave and independent, and
would venture across open fields for any distance.

One day he said to me:

‘Hulloa, Scud! why don’t you ever come to the Hall nowadays? I believe
you’re scared. Don’t you want another taste of those cob-nuts?’

‘You don’t mean to say you go there?’ exclaimed I.

‘Of course I do. Great polecats! do you think I’ve got nothing better to
do than mess about here all day picking up a few rotten grains of corn or
green acorns?’

‘You ran fast enough on the day you and I got shot at,’ I retorted,
rather annoyed at his insinuations.

‘A precious pair of young idiots we were!’ he returned scornfully. ‘I
take jolly good care they don’t see me nowadays.’

‘How do you manage that?’

‘Why, in the first place I go at dawn, before any one is about; in the
second, I don’t cut across the lawn, but round to the right of the house.
Are you game to come to-morrow morning?’

A longing to see the old place once more came over me. I was also anxious
to find out what Rusty was about, for I did not believe for a moment that
the attraction lay in the cob-nuts. I hesitated.

‘Very well,’ said Rusty, taking my silence for consent. ‘Meet me at
sun-up by the pool at the other end of the wood.’

I won’t describe how we reached the Hall, except to say that, instead of
working down the road-hedge to the left, as we had done on the previous
occasion, we struck boldly out down the right-hand side to the large
meadow. Rusty guided me round to the home farm-buildings, which lay some
quarter of a mile to the right of the Hall. The farm and rick-yards were
surrounded on two sides by a stone wall, outside which was a strip of
laurel shrubbery.

‘Now, you wait here,’ said Rusty with a patronizing air which I could not
help resenting. ‘I’m going over the wall for my breakfast. You needn’t
watch if you don’t like.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rusty!’ exclaimed I angrily, for I thought it sheer
bravado on his part. ‘There’s nothing to eat there, except the chicken
grain you profess to despise.’

‘Oh! isn’t there?’ jeered my brother; and before I could say another word
he had leaped on to the wall, and with another bold spring was down in
the yard.

It was still very early, a bright cloudless August morning, and
everything dripping with dew. The place appeared to be deserted,
although from the kitchen chimney of the farm-house a slight blue smoke
was rising. Climbing into the top of a laurel, I got a good view of the
whole yard, and watched Rusty nimbly scuttle across towards the further
buddings. Behind these he was lost to sight.

Suddenly arose the wild cackling of a frightened hen, and next moment, to
my utter horror, there came Rusty round the corner of a shed, head up,
as bold as brass, with a young chicken swinging by the neck between his
sharp teeth. At the same moment I saw—what he failed to notice—a man, who
raised his head cautiously over the half-door of a cowshed on the far
side of the yard, and the level rays of the rising sun glinting on the
barrels of a gun. I gave one sharp bark of warning. Too late! A puff of
smoke sprang from the muzzle, the heavy report sent the sparrows up in a
chattering cloud, and of my brother no more remained than a little red
rag of broken fur stretched on the cobbles which paved the yard.

I suppose the man with the gun could not have heard my attempted warning.
If he had, nothing could have saved me, for I was too horror-stricken for
the moment to move at all. I sat like a stuffed squirrel and watched him
walk across to where Rusty lay. ‘Well, I never would ha’ believed it!’
he said wonderingly, holding the small bunch of mangled fur out at arm’s
length. ‘If one of them chicks has gone I’ve lost a dozen; and to think
it was this here little red rascal!’ He turned and called loudly, ‘Jim,
bring me a hammer and a nail.’

A tousle-headed boy came out of the back door of the farm-house with the
required implements. The man took the hammer, and deliberately nailed
the dead body of my brother against the tarred wooden wall of one of the
barns. ‘You’ll do for a warning,’ he remarked grimly as he turned away.
And, sick at heart, I dropped out of sight and made the best of my way
back to the coppice.

Such was the end of the strongest and bravest squirrel whom I ever knew.
You must not imagine for one moment that such a crime as he was guilty
of is a common one among squirrels. It is, indeed, very rare for one of
our family to take to a carnivorous diet, but when he does fall into such
a habit he never abandons it. They say that there is a kind of parrot
in New Zealand, called the kea, which in old days, before sheep were
imported into the islands, lived entirely upon seeds and insects. But
the bird found it was easier to pick at the raw skins of newly-killed
sheep, hung out on the fences, than to hunt food for itself; and, once
it acquired a taste for blood, there was no more caterpillar-hunting for
the kea! Next thing the shepherds knew, sheep were found dying or dead
all over the ranges, the fat above the kidneys torn out by the powerful
hooked beak of this goblin bird. Now the Government has set a price upon
the head of the kea, and the outlaw lives a proscribed and hunted life.

Far be it from the squirrels that, as a race, they should take to the
evil habit of flesh eating. But from time immemorial a few in each
generation have begun with devouring birds’ eggs; from that gone on to
eating young hedge-sparrows, redstarts, and the like; and finally, like
my poor brother, taken to larger game, such as young pheasants, ducks, or
chickens. But they seldom have the chance of long continuing such raids,
for, unlike foxes, rats, polecats, and other enemies of the poultry yard,
they do not hunt by night, but boldly in broad daylight. Consequently
they almost inevitably meet fate in the shape of a charge of lead.

[Illustration: ‘AND TO THINK IT WAS THIS HERE LITTLE RED RASCAL’]

Whether the man who shot Rusty told the story to the ginger-whiskered
keeper, or whether the latter himself surprised some of us feasting on
his pheasant food in the coppice I do not know, but from that very day
dated the war against the squirrels on the Hall estate.

That same afternoon, having discharged the unpleasant duty of telling
poor Rusty’s widow of the sad event of the morning, I was roaming sadly
about our oak-tree, searching under the bark for the insects which
inhabited the rotten wood, when I heard a gun fired twice at the other
end of the coppice. At first I hardly moved, for I took it that the
keeper was merely killing a weasel or some such vermin. But when two more
shots followed quickly, and immediately afterwards the vicious crack,
crack of a lighter weapon, I was amazed, for, like all other woodland
dwellers, I was perfectly well aware that the shooting season had not yet
commenced. When the double barrel spoke again, and this time nearer, I
called Walnut, who was up in the top branches, and together we took hasty
refuge in our hole.

We had not been there five minutes before there came a quick scuttering
of claws up the rough bark, and simultaneously the tramping of heavy feet
through the bracken at a little distance.

I was moving to the entrance to find out what was going on when something
fairly shot into the hole, knocking me back to its farthest end. When
I had picked myself up, there was Cob lying panting, almost too much
exhausted to speak.

‘They’re after us, Scud!’ he gasped at last.

‘Who? What?’

‘The keeper and a boy. They’ve shot three of us already, and I’m
frightened to death about Hazel. I was away from home and couldn’t get
back. I saw three dead bodies.’

Here a gruff human voice broke in from below.

‘Where’s the dratted little beggar got to? I seed him jump into this here
oak. He can’t be far off.’

‘He’s sure to be in one of the holes in the trunk,’ replied more sharply
pitched tones which I recognized at once as those of the high-collared
boy whose mark I still bore in the shape of a shot hole in one ear.
‘Climb up, Tompkins, and see.’

‘Climb! Thank’ee, sir. I wasn’t engaged to break my neck climbing
trees—not at my age. Tell you what, sir. I’ll go on with the gun. You can
wait here quietly, and after a bit he’s sure to come out, and then you
can shoot him.’

‘All right,’ answered the boy, and we plainly heard Tompkins stamping
off. Cob was crazy to get away and go in search of his wife and family,
but the boy below, who had about as much idea of woodcraft as a frog has
of flying, made such a noise moving from one foot to the other, breathing
hard and shifting his rifle about, that even a hedgehog would have known
better than to take the chances of showing himself.

His patience was about on a par with his other performances, for in less
than five minutes he became tired of waiting, and moved off after the
keeper.

But we heard no more shots. Bad news spreads like magic in a wood, and by
this time every squirrel of the forty or fifty who inhabited our coppice
was snug under cover, and it would have taken better eyes than those of
Ginger or his young friend to find us. After another half hour or so we
heard the far gate slam to, and knew that danger was over—at least, for
the present. Then Cob went off as hard as his legs would carry him, and
later on I was delighted to hear that he had found Hazel and his two
young ones quite safe and unhurt.

To say that we were furious at this wanton massacre is to put our
feelings very mildly. From time out of mind the lives of the squirrels
on the Hall estate had been sacred, and except when trespassing
louts—such as those who had caused the death of my father—had attacked us
we had lived safe and happy from one generation to another.

As a race, we squirrels are very conservative and home loving. So long
as we are not molested, the same families and their children remain in
the same wood year after year, never emigrating unless driven to do so
by over-population or lack of food. If, on the other hand, the squirrels
in any particular locality are regularly persecuted by man, always their
worst enemy, the survivors will very soon clear out completely. There
are to-day whole tracts of beautiful beech woods in Buckinghamshire,
where, though food is perhaps as plentiful as anywhere else in England,
yet hardly a squirrel is to be seen. Our race has been so harried that
they have left altogether. Modern high preserving is what we unlucky
squirrels cannot stand. Where the owner’s one idea is to get as large a
head of pheasants as the coverts can possibly carry, every other woodland
creature goes to the wall, and the keepers shoot us down as mercilessly
as they kill kestrels, owls, jays, hedgehogs, and a dozen other harmless
birds and beasts.

Very soon it became clear that the new tenant of the Hall had declared
war against us. The pheasants, of which an immense number had been turned
down, were his only care. He used to come and strut about while Tompkins
was feeding them. As Walnut said, he only needed a long tail and a few
feathers to resemble exactly a stupid old, stuck-up cock-pheasant himself.

Again and again during that August Tompkins with his twelve bore, and the
band-box boy with a small repeating rifle, invaded the wood and fired
indiscriminately at every squirrel they could set eyes on. But, as you
may imagine, we very soon learnt caution, and when news of their approach
was signalled from tree to tree, every squirrel in the coppice took
instant cover. Still, our enemies occasionally succeeded in cutting off
one of our number in some tree where total concealment was impossible,
and then the cruel little brute of a boy would make him a target for
his tiny bullets, often inflicting half a dozen wounds before a vital
spot was struck. Then at last the tightly-clutching claws would slowly
relax, and the poor, bleeding little body come thudding down from bough
to bough, to be pounced on by the young murderer with a yell of fiendish
glee.

In those days I kept Walnut very close at home. Except at dawn or just
before dusk we never ventured far from cover, with the result that
neither was ever shot at. It was uncommonly lucky for us that this was
the time of most plentiful food, for otherwise, being afraid to roam far
in search of provender, we must often have gone hungry. But though, as I
have already mentioned, the early drought had caused a famine in nuts,
acorns, and mast, yet there was plenty else to eat. It was as wet now as
it had been dry in the earlier part of the year, and the steamy heat had
produced amazing crops of mushrooms and other fungi. The hedgerows, too,
which before the rain had looked thin and brown, were now full of rank,
new growth, while as for insects of all kinds, they fairly swarmed. On
the pheasant food, too, we levied regular toll. In any case, the fool of
a keeper threw down twice as much as the birds cared to eat.

In those days our enemy was busy with other weapons beside the gun. Men
were constantly at work lopping the underbrush to keep the rides open,
while much spading went on to clear the water-logged ditches.

September was three parts gone, and the pheasants were nearly full grown,
but as yet so tame that they had almost to be kicked before they would
use their wings. They were still fed in the small glade close below the
oak, when Walnut and I, peeping out cautiously from the end of the hollow
branch, would watch our enemy with the ginger whiskers strewing the
wheat, and then, as soon as he was safely out of the gate, make a wild
rush down and eat our fill. Pheasants are quite the most utter fools of
any birds that I know. With their great weight and strong beaks we could
have done nothing to resist had they chosen to attack us when we raided
their larder. But this never seemed to occur to them. You have only to
look very fierce and rush at him for the largest cock-pheasant to run for
dear life.

More often than before, the new master of the Hall began to accompany his
keeper and watch the feeding process. Great hazel-sticks! the man was as
fussy as a hen with ducklings.

However, there’s many a slip ’twixt the nut and the teeth, and our
pompous friend was not destined to have things all his own way after all.




CHAPTER X

POACHERS AND A BATTUE


One still night about ten days before the end of September, Walnut and I
were roused by a light which, flashing across the opening to our retreat,
was reflected into our eyes. It passed immediately, but not before we
were both broad awake.

Several men were trampling about close underneath the oak.

‘Lie still, Walnut,’ I ordered uneasily, for this was something new to
me. I had never before heard men moving in the wood so late at night,
and I was at first inclined to think that there might be some new plot
of Tompkins or his satellites a-foot. Very cautiously I peered out.
There was a young moon somewhere behind the soft veil of cloud, which
covered the sky so that it was not too dark to see the figures of three
men moving cautiously across the glade in which the pheasants fed. One
carried a dark lantern, the tiny beam of light from which was what had
roused us the moment before.

‘They’ll be in them young beeches,’ said one in a hoarse whisper. ‘There
ain’t any in the oak.’

I saw them all three move cautiously across into a clump of young beeches
which stood just across the glade. There they stopped, and the lantern
was flashed upwards into the low branches, its light gleaming golden upon
the yellowing leaves. A slight rustle followed, and a voice muttered:

‘I sees ’em. Shut the lantern an’ help me fix the smudge.’

The three now stooped together on the ground and appeared to be gathering
dry leaves and heaping them together in a little pile. Presently I heard
the faint scratching of a match, and a small blue flame illuminated three
eager faces. Two of them were men whom I had never seen before; the third
I recognized as a labourer whom I had more than once watched shake his
fist fiercely as he passed the locked gate of the coppice.

The man who held the match touched it to the leaves, but before they
could burst into bright flame the two others penned the little fire by
holding a couple of sacks round it.

One of the men threw a handful of powder over the fire which at once
choked it down, making it burn with a sickly blue flame. Then they all
three stood perfectly still, hiding the fire with their sacks, but
keeping their heads turned as far as possible away from the smoke which
went wreathing up in thick columns into the foliage above them.

Before many moments had passed there came a slight whirr, the sound of
wings beating on leaves, and with a flop, down fell a great pheasant
almost on the heads of the watchers. Quick as a cat, one of the men
reached out one arm, seized the bird, and wrung its neck. He had hardly
done so when there was another rustle and thud, and a second of our
oppressor’s pets shared the fate of the first.

It was evident that from the stuff they put in the flame there arose
poisonous fumes that stupefied the roosting birds.

Very soon even we could smell the noisome stuff, and Walnut wrinkled up
his nose in disgust. Even a human being, let alone a squirrel, whose
sense of smell is fifty times more acute, could easily have perceived it.

[Illustration: A SMALL BLUE FLAME ILLUMINATED THREE EAGER FACES.]

Presently the poachers lifted up the whole fire, which we now saw had
been built upon a small square of sheet-iron, and removed it bodily to a
fresh spot, under another tree. Here no fewer than four pheasants were
secured one after another, and then the fire was moved again. So they
went on for two hours or more, working round and round the glade. As
nearly all the pheasants roosted in this part of the coppice there was no
need to go further afield. At last, when their sack was fairly bulging
with dead game, they took their departure.

Twice during the next three nights did the gang of poachers return, and
each time went home with a score or more of long-tails. Tompkins at last
began to miss his birds at feeding-time, and to suspect that something
was wrong. Walnut and I sat secure in our retreat overhead, and jeered at
the man’s utter stupidity. Why, even if he had no nose for the brimstone,
of which the whole place fairly reeked, there were great footprints all
over the place telling their story in large type to anyone who had eyes!
Yet the keeper absolutely walked over them without looking at them. The
very idea of poachers never seemed to occur to him. I verily believe
he thought that we had something to do with the disappearance of his
precious pheasants, for as he left the coppice he fired at and killed a
poor young cousin of ours.

The leaves had begun to fall once more, when one day the pompous little
fat man accompanied Tompkins through the coppice. They stopped in the
glade below us, and it was evident the new tenant was uneasy. He began
peering and pointing, and questioning the keeper as if he were only half
satisfied.

‘Oh, they’re all right, sir,’ replied the keeper hastily, in answer to
his questions. ‘You see, sir, they’ve got so big now they don’t need the
grain. They’re round in the bracken finding their own feed.’

The master swallowed his story like a thrush swallowing a worm. Indeed,
he was evidently rather pleased, for he thought the birds would be wild
and strong on the wing for next day.

That same night I was wakened by gunshots. Never before had I heard a gun
fired at night, and the sound was most alarming. I thought at first that
the firing was at a distance, but just as I looked out the darkness was
lit by a flash quite close at hand. The report was, however, strangely
slight. As a matter of fact, the guns were loaded with reduced charges.

Immediately at the report down flopped a pheasant to the ground. The
poacher gang were at work, and as time was short were shooting the
pheasants as they roosted. Pop, pop, pop! The pheasants were falling at
the rate of one a minute. There would be very few left for our stout
friend at the Hall and his swell city friends next day. Two sacks were
full.

‘Just a dozen more,’ we heard one of them say.

‘Right oh!’ answered another. He spoke out loud, for by this time the
gang had been so long undisturbed that they had become quite reckless,
and neglected the precautions which they had at first observed.

The words were hardly out of his mouth before there was a sudden rush of
feet, and there came the keeper, his son, another man, and the fourth was
no other than the new tenant himself.

Ginger recklessly rushed forward shouting. Next instant a gun cracked—I
never saw who fired the shot—and Ginger, with a hideous yell, fell
forward on his face, and lay twitching in a horrid fashion on the ground.

I saw Ginger’s son charge forward, swinging his stick, with the other man
close behind him. I saw the poachers run for their lives, leaving the
spoil behind them. But what was the new Squire about? He never budged,
but stood there like a stuck pig; and even in the dim light it was easy
to see his legs quaking and the shivers that shook his podgy frame.

Not until poachers and pursuers had vanished through the trees, and the
crashing sound of their running feet had almost died in the distance, did
the cowardly little man move slowly up to where his keeper lay.

‘Are—you—much—hurt, Tompkins?’ he stammered, in shaking accents.

Tompkins only groaned, and the stout man, kneeling beside him, fairly
wrung his hands in hopeless incompetency. At last he seemed to remember
something, and pulling out a flask from his pocket, put it to Tompkins’s
lips just as the keeper’s son and the other man returned empty-handed.

The new Squire turned on them, storming at them for having allowed the
poachers to escape, without seeming to heed the fact that his keeper
still lay unconscious at his feet. He stamped and swore and almost
shrieked in his impotent anger. Presently his son and the other man
hoisted up Tompkins, who seemed to have got the charge in his legs, and
between them carried him off, the little stout man stalking growling
along in the rear. Then, at last, Walnut and I were left to get some
sleep.

However, there was no peace for us. By ten o’clock next day the coppice
was full of beaters, making noise enough to rouse a dormouse, and
scaring the remaining pheasants nearly out of their feathers. Instead
of running or hiding, the silly birds immediately rose and flew up over
the trees, and then began such a salvo of firing as none of us had ever
heard in our lives before. The whole coppice was full of the sharp, sour
smell of smokeless powder, and as for us and the other coppice dwellers,
we cowered in the very deepest corners of our various refuges, and waited
with shaking bodies and aching heads for the din to cease. At last it did
stop, but only to break out afresh at the next spinney, and so on all day
round the whole country-side.

In the afternoon, after it was all over, and just as Walnut and I were
starting out to find our evening meal, there came a fresh invasion.
It was headed by the stout new tenant, gorgeously arrayed in a check
shooting suit, which in itself was enough to scare any self-respecting
squirrel out of his wits, and with him walked five others like unto
himself. He was evidently giving them all an account, a glorified
account, of what had happened. By the way he pointed and ran a few steps,
and let fly with his fist, it seemed as if he personally must have killed
the whole gang of poachers, and they all listened attentively, though one
or two laughed behind his back.

I learnt afterwards from Cob that he had seen a man going about with the
sacks full of dead pheasants the poachers had dropped. He had scattered
them here and there throughout the wood. This had puzzled him much, and
he had watched to see if they were left there; but, no; when the shoot
was over the pheasants were picked up again with those that had really
been shot by the guests, and in this way they made up quite a big bag.

All this poaching business does not seem to have much to do with my
life. Indirectly, however, it had, for the new tenant of the Hall was so
angry about the poaching that on the very day after the battue he set
a whole gang to work to run barbed wire—of all awful things!—round the
whole of the coppice. Other men were put to lop the hedges close, and
two new keepers engaged. The latter were worse than Tompkins. I suppose
it was by way of justifying their existence that they walked about all
day with their guns, firing at almost everything they could see that
was not game. It became almost impossible to show our noses outside our
homes during daylight, and many an evening Walnut and I went hungry to
bed. Life became one prolonged dodging, for even when the new keepers
were not about the workmen would take pot shots with stones at any of
us they could view. Incidentally, too, they knocked over many a fat
rabbit and dozens of the remaining pheasants. But of these proceedings
their employer, intent on saving his coverts from the village poachers,
remained in blissful ignorance.

At last there came a crisis. Walnut and I had taken advantage of the
quiet of the midday hour—the men being at their dinner—to steal out and
get some beech-mast, when suddenly a missile of some sort hissed just
above my head, cutting away a twig close above. I paused an instant in
utter amazement, for I had heard no report, when—ping! another bullet
whacked on the bark close below my feet, and there was a brute of a boy
in corduroys, his head peering from behind a trunk, and in the very act
of stretching the elastic of a heavy catapult. One quick bark to Walnut,
and we were both away as hard as we could lay legs to the branches. A
third buckshot whizzed close behind my brush as I fled. The boy, seeing
us run, at once followed and began positively showering shot after us.
It was impossible to reach home under the bombardment, and if we had not
been lucky enough to find a knot-hole in a beech just large enough to
shelter the two of us, one or other—both, perhaps—would have been maimed
or killed.

This was the last straw. For some days a vague resolution had been
forming slowly in my brain. That night, as we crouched, almost too hungry
to sleep, in our oak-tree home, I told Walnut we could stay there no
longer, but must leave the coppice where we had so long sheltered.

He seemed rather to like the idea than otherwise, being young and ready
for adventure.

Very early next morning I slipped across to the old beech and told my
mother. I was anxious that she and the others should accompany us, but
this she would not do.

‘No, Scud; I am too old to leave my home. I shall stay here and take my
chances. But you, I think, are wise to go. Waste no time in getting off,
for you must be well away before the men come to their work.’

A few minutes later Walnut and I had crossed the road and were hastening
away across an open field bound due north. We went that way because we
could go no other—a squirrel migrating invariably travels north. I do not
know the reason, but some instinct implanted in us ages and ages ago,
perhaps even before men began to walk erect, tells us to do so, and we
obey it, and shall obey it, thousands of years hence. In just the same
way the Norwegian lemmings march in their myriads towards the sea, and
are drowned in the salt waves in a vain, instinctive effort to reach some
place that has long disappeared beneath the waves.

I cannot tell you all our wanderings or the perils that we encountered
by the way. Twice Walnut was very nearly caught by a weasel; once a
wide-winged hen sparrow-hawk came whistling down out of the blue as we
were crossing an open field, and we escaped only by a happy accident into
an old drain-tile which happened to lie near by. In this narrow refuge we
both squeezed our trembling bodies until the bird of prey had departed in
disgust.

We travelled very slowly, stopping sometimes for a whole day in any
coppice in which we happened to find ourselves. Several times we almost
made up our minds to remain for good in one or other of these woods, but
always the same difficulty stood in our way. The scarcity of food was
universal. All the country-side had suffered alike from the great drought
of the early summer, and mast, acorns, and nuts alike were conspicuous
by their absence. As far as the present went, we did well enough. In
autumn a squirrel can always find food of some kind or another.

The love of wandering was like a fever. In the course of a week or so we
two had become regular vagabonds. There was an absolute fascination in
new scenes each day and new quarters each night; and, feeling that we had
cut ourselves off for ever from all our ties, there seemed no special
object in stopping anywhere in particular.

And yet at times I was anxious. I knew well enough that winter was
coming, and that we must settle down and find a home and collect stores
before the cold weather.

There came a morning when the sky was full of high wind cloud, but the
air so clear that distant objects seemed but a few fields away, and,
leaving a small fir-plantation on the flank of a hill where we had spent
the night, we looked down upon a deep valley, along the bottom of which
was a long line of timber, wide in some places, narrow in others. Between
the thinning autumn foliage one caught here and there the sparkle of
running water. A mile or more down the valley, and on the far side of the
river, a large old-fashioned house, that vaguely reminded me of the Hall,
lay against the steep side of the opposite slope, with gardens terraced
to the water-edge.

The wood behind it was all that we could have hoped, and more. Ancient
trees of enormous girth and size grew so thick and close that the
sun seldom if ever reached the thickets of undergrowth beneath their
spreading tops. Hardly a sign was to be seen of the interfering hand of
man, and though the place was full of wild life—rabbits, wood-pigeons,
and the like—pheasants were conspicuous by their absence. A peculiarity
of the wood, no doubt on account of its damp, sheltered position, was
the immense amount of ivy which covered the massive trunks with clinging
tendrils and dark green leaves. There was food too, for the oaks whose
roots no doubt penetrated far below the level of the stream, had a fair
crop of acorns, and, better still, there were hazel-bushes close along
the water’s edge which were still fairly full of ripe nuts. The place was
a perfect Paradise from a squirrel’s point of view, and my half-joking
suggestion of spending the winter in it speedily became a fixed idea.

The first thing to do was to find a residence. This was an easy task,
for there were dozens to choose from. Walnut was very keen upon an old
magpie’s nest which he found in a huge thorn-tree, and which was still in
excellent repair even to the roof; but I had had enough of built nests,
and preferred a knot-hole in a beech. Once a squirrel takes to living in
holes in trees, he usually sticks to the same description of residence to
the end of his days.

One fact which struck me as odd during our first day’s exploration of the
river-side wood was the almost entire absence of our own tribe. We only
saw two squirrels besides ourselves, and they were young and anything but
friendly. In fact, they both bolted before we could have a word with them.

It was the drumming of heavy rain among the dying foliage above that woke
us at daylight next morning. The sky was one uniform grey, and everything
was soaking and dripping. We had reason indeed to be thankful that we had
found a warm dry home, for this weather looked like lasting.

Last it did, all day long, and as there was nothing else to do we curled
up and slept. Evening came, and still it rained—harder if anything than
before. It was too wet to go out and forage, and so we went hungry to
bed. It is a fortunate dispensation that we squirrel folk can go for
long periods without food if we can find a dry place to sleep in, for I
have seldom known a squirrel who would not sooner be hungry than wet.

Next morning it was still raining, though not so hard. Large pools lay
in every depression, and the hoarse roar of the swollen river echoed
through the soaking woods. Rain had now been falling for thirty-six hours
straight on end, and we had been all that time without a meal.

Walnut told me he was simply starving, and must go out and find a few
acorns.

I let him go, but, being sleepy, I did not accompany him.

I was not at all uneasy about him, for the wood seemed safe enough,
and Walnut, now more than six months old, was well able to take care
of himself. As for me, I drowsed until about midday, and then looking
out again found that the downpour had at last ceased and the sun was
shining once more. I missed Walnut, for I was so much accustomed to his
nestling beside me; and, stretching lazily, I sallied forth to look
for him, stepping daintily along the soaking boughs in order to avoid
bringing down upon myself the great drops of moisture which hung on every
yellowing leaf. I made straight for the hazel-bushes, which we had found
on the first day near to the water’s edge; but when I came in sight of
the river I could hardly believe my eyes, so tremendous a change had the
great rain wrought. In place of the shallow stream that purled across
pebble beds from pool to pool, a broad torrent, red with the clay of the
upland fields, was raging down with appalling force and fury. Even where
the banks had been highest the flood was level with their tops, and in
many places it had overflowed them so that the nut-bushes stood up like
islands among wide backwaters where the current eddied lazily, swinging
on its discoloured surface millions of dead leaves and sticks.

The sight fairly fascinated me, and for the moment I forgot my hunger,
Walnut, and everything else in watching the irresistible force of the
rushing torrent and noticing the speed at which the logs and sticks which
it had tom from its banks were carried downwards.

[Illustration: ANOTHER MOMENT FOUND ME COMFORTABLY PERCHED IN THE
BRANCHES OF THE HAZEL-BUSHES.]

But hunger soon reasserted its claims, and I began to reconnoitre for
the best means of reaching the nut-bushes and breakfast. A little
further down the stream a low, flat-topped oak extended its spreading
branches more than half-way across the flooded river, and I saw that
from the point of one of its long limbs it would be easy to drop into
a good-sized clump of hazel-bush below. No sooner seen than done, and
another minute found me comfortably perched in the branches of the
hazel-bushes cracking nuts and eating them with a naturally fine appetite
sharpened by forty hours abstinence.

That I was on an island completely cut off on all sides by water troubled
me not at all. I was much too hungry to worry about that, for I felt sure
that I could jump back on to my oak bough, which formed a bridge to bring
me back to land again, and so I worked steadily downwards from branch to
branch.

I was only a foot or two from the ground when a rustle among the thick,
mossy stumps below attracted my attention. Glancing down, the sight that
met my eyes almost paralysed me with horror.




CHAPTER XI

MY LAST ADVENTURE


The animal which had just pushed its way out of the hollow recesses of
the hazel-roots resembled nothing so much as a weasel, but a weasel of
such giant proportions as I had never before dreamed of. From nose to
tip of tail it was nearly two feet long. The creature had a domed head,
with prominent eyes and widely arched eyebrows, giving it a strangely
sinister appearance. It was, in fact, though I did not realize this at
the time, no other than the rare and dreaded polecat, which keepers call
the foumart.

When I first caught sight of this monster I was sitting on a bough barely
a couple of feet from the ground, and so great was my amazement and
fright that for an instant I sat staring down into the glaring yellow
eyes, unable to collect my senses at all. Of a sudden the creature
launched itself upwards with almost the quickness and ferocity of a
striking snake. Its thin lips, curled back, showed two rows of close-set
white teeth, sharp as needles, and at the same instant an abominable
odour, like that of a stoat, but far more fœtid, nearly suffocated me.

Recovering myself just in time, I made one desperate spring, and
succeeded in reaching a twig out of reach of the brute’s jaws. But the
foumart had no idea of being so easily cheated of his meal. The branches,
thick and close-set, offered him an easy ladder, and to my horror and
alarm, he came after me with unexpected and startling speed. I completely
lost my head, and dashed away up to the top of the hazel-bush with a
recklessness inspired by terror.

In my haste I found that I had ascended, not the main stalk of the clump,
but another not so tall. The result was that the oak branch from which
I had dropped was now a long way above me. But a rustle in the foliage
below told me that my enemy was at my heels, and nerved me to attempt the
jump.

My claws just grazed the under side of the oak bough. I fell back, and
next moment had plunged with a splash into the swirling waters of the
swollen torrent.

The fall carried me far below the muddy surface, but next moment I
rose, gasping for breath, and struck out vehemently. I know that it is
popularly supposed that a squirrel cannot swim, but that when he wishes
to cross a river he launches himself upon a piece of floating bark, and
using his tail as a sail, ferries himself across. A squirrel, as a matter
of fact, is a very fair swimmer, and can, and does at a pinch, cross
wide rivers in this way. Though I had never tried it before, yet I found
myself quite able to keep my head above water; but a very short struggle
convinced me that it was foolishness to attempt to make head against the
fierce current of the flooded stream.

For I had fallen not into the placid backwater behind the nut-bush
island, but out into the edge of the main stream, and a cross current
catching me, had sent me swinging out into the very centre of the racing
river. For a few moments I beat the water desperately with all four paws
in a frantic effort to get back to the shore which I had left; but very
soon I exhausted myself so completely that I could fight no longer, and,
paddling feebly, was swept down-stream at a positively terrifying speed.

It was now late in October, and the water was very cold. Soon I began to
feel quite numbed. Besides this, I was horribly frightened, while the
pace at which the small whirlpools into which I was constantly flung,
spun me around, made me giddy, and added to the hopelessness of my
feelings. The whole experience was so horrifying that I may be forgiven
for confessing the terror I felt. Once or twice I saw tree-roots or
projecting points of high banks forming promontories which extended out
into the flood, and so long as strength lasted I made fierce efforts to
reach them. But in each case the current, rendered the more irresistible
by opposition, mocked my puny efforts and whirled me away out into the
centre again. Once a small log, floating almost submerged, overtook me as
I battled with the stream, and, catching me across the neck, pushed me
quite under water and drove over me. When I rose once more, my strength
was almost spent, and I felt that I could not much longer continue the
useless struggle.

I was sinking lower and lower in the water; my strokes were becoming more
feeble every moment, and it was only a question of a few minutes before
I must have sunk for good, when I suddenly caught sight of a long narrow
plank, evidently torn from some paling by the flood, sweeping down, end
on, beside me. With a last despairing effort I struck out for it, and
just before it had passed quite out of my reach, succeeded in scrambling
upon one end of it. It dipped beneath my water-logged weight, and the
current almost snatched me away. But, clinging with all my claws, I
managed to crawl along to its centre, and found to my joy that it would
support me.

But, even so, my position was extremely perilous. The way in which the
banks flew by showed how rapid was the rush of the flooded river. Suppose
the plank caught against any obstacle, it must at once roll over and
plunge me again into the water. Happily, however, this did not happen,
and though time and again it checked and quivered, I managed to retain my
hold, and so was swept along almost as fast as a man could run.

I passed the large house down the valley, and beyond it the river
broadened, but still ran with almost unabated speed. Soon I had cleared
the wood, and was driving along between pastures which sloped steeply
upwards from bluff-like banks. Once I saw a drowned sheep caught in the
brambles under a curve, and shuddered to think how soon the same fate
might befall me. Field after field flew by, and once more the river
plunged into the shadow of thick trees, and then a new and terrifying
sound came to my ears. It was the deep, sullen roar of falling water.

Sweeping round a wide curve, I became aware of a long weir in front
penning the brimming river which foamed along its top, while through
the open sluice-gates the main stream plunged in a mass of yellow foam.
Now, indeed, I gave myself up for lost, for I saw that I could not hope
to survive the passage down that fierce fall. On like an arrow sped the
plank, straight for the centre of the opening, and all hope that it
might drift against the weir was gone, when, suddenly, with a jar that
almost flung me from my insecure perch, the front end of the plank struck
something hidden below the muddy water, probably a sunken stake, and
instantly was swung side on, jamming across the very mouth of the gates.
Gathering all my few remaining energies, I made a feeble leap, and more
by good luck than good management reached the top of the weir. Even then
my troubles were not over, for the weir was old and broken, and in places
the flood was actually foaming over its top. But after waiting a little
to recover my strength, I succeeded in jumping these gaps, and at last
struggled safely ashore once more.

I was soaked as I had never been in my life before, chilled to the bone,
so exhausted that I could hardly move, and yet intensely grateful to be
once more on firm ground. Luckily for me, the sun was still shining, and
the air mild and warm for the time of year; so I crawled up into a small
tree, and lying out on a branch on the sunny side, waited for my dripping
fur to dry a little.

My position was far from an enviable one. Here I was, in a strange wood,
far away from our winter-quarters, and separated from Walnut, without
food, friends, or a home. However, Walnut was luckily well able to look
after himself, and there was no doubt about finding food of some sort, so
I consoled myself with the thought that I would start as soon as possible
and make my way back to the river wood.

While I sat there sunning myself I was surprised and pleased to hear a
familiar gnawing sound in a neighbouring beech-tree, and suddenly there
came into view another squirrel, a handsome fellow with an uncommonly
light coat. I called to him, and he came across in a most friendly way.

He remarked on my dripping coat civilly, and I told him the story of my
misfortunes.

‘Ugh!’ he shuddered, with a glance at the foaming river, ‘I wouldn’t
take a swim in that—not for a coppice full of cob-nuts!’

We chatted for a while, and my new friend was good enough to show me a
nice lot of fir-cones, on which I made a much-needed meal. Then I told
him that I meant to go back up-stream to the river wood, and I suppose
I must have dilated on its attractiveness, for suddenly he proposed
accompanying me.

‘Like you,’ he said sadly, ‘I have lost my wife and all my family. I
don’t know what became of them. I was out one day feeding, and when I
came home they were all gone. There were footsteps below the tree, so no
doubt I have some ruffianly man to thank for stealing them.’

I was anxious to start at once, but the pale squirrel, who told me that
his name was Crab, begged me to share his quarters for the night and put
off my departure till the morning. Oddly enough, though very tired, I was
singularly unwilling to defer my start. However, he over-persuaded me.
And for him the delay proved sad indeed, though fortunate enough for me.

Crab’s quarters were in a very odd place—in the hollow head of a large
pollard willow not far from the water’s edge. I told him that I had
never before seen a squirrel live in a willow, and he explained that he
had adopted this refuge because the ground beneath was so wet and swampy
that it choked off human intruders. By degrees I found out that this wood
was simply at the mercy of tramps and other vagabonds who camped there in
numbers. Crab showed me the ashes of their fires alongside of the rough
cart-track which ran through the coppice, and the places where they had
cut wood to burn; evidently here was the other extreme from the Hall
grounds—a country utterly neglected by its owners. Not a rabbit was to
be seen, and Crab told me that, except for wood-pigeons and small birds,
there was hardly a living thing in the wood.

‘The gipsies even catch the hedgehogs, roast them in clay, and eat them,’
he said with a shudder.

‘And who are gipsies?’ I inquired, puzzled. I had never heard the word
before.

Crab shuddered.

‘Brown men with traps and snares, and black-haired women with red
handkerchiefs and shining earrings. Terrible people! Cleverer than
keepers, and much more greedy. Pray you may not see any,’ he ended.

What Crab told me made me the more anxious to clear out of this
ill-omened spot, and next morning, as soon as the dew was a little off
the grass, we started. Crab did not know much about the way we had to
travel, but the river was our guide. What we both were chiefly afraid of
were open meadows over which we knew that we had to pass. However, I was
by now such a hardened wanderer that the risks of such a journey did not
trouble me greatly.

It was an ideal autumn morning, calm, with a warm sun shining out of a
blue sky, and the rain-washed air marvellously clear. Small birds chirped
and twittered in every hedge, but I could see for myself that what Crab
had told me was true. There was no game left in the whole country-side.
Even rabbits were very scarce. The fields, too, were neglected. They were
not half drained, so that the grass was rough, and patchy with clumps of
reeds. The hedges were untrimmed, immensely high, and yet full of gaps.
The lane running parallel with the river was scored with deep ruts which
brimmed with muddy puddles.

The tall hedges offered us excellent travelling, and we saw nobody except
a couple of farm-labourers striding along through the mud, their corduroy
trousers tied below their knees with string, and their short clay pipes
leaving a trail of strong-smelling blue smoke in their wake.

For half a mile or so we kept the hedge alongside the lane. Then the road
turned abruptly away from the river, so we left it, crossed a meadow, and
got into another hedge which seemed to lead us in the right direction.
It brought us after a time into a large leasowe sloping to the river.
This leasowe I remember as one of the most beautiful places which I
have ever seen. The ground, dropping sharply, was thickly studded with
clumps of alder and hazel, the tops of which had been cut at irregular
interval, while the roots had grown to enormous dimensions. Each clump
was surrounded by a tangle of blackberry and brier, making a thick,
impenetrable shelter. The leaves of these various trees were all in the
full splendour of late autumn tints, and contrasted brilliantly with the
green of the grass and the myriads of scarlet hips and haws; while there
were dotted about the leasowe a number of crab-apple trees whose scarlet
leaves and red and golden fruit gave a last touch of gorgeous colouring
to the whole scene.

There were a good many nuts, and we crossed leisurely from clump to
clump, now stopping to shell a nut, now to sample the crimson side of
a crab apple. I was tasting some over-ripe blackberries, many of which
contained the most delicious little white grubs, when Crab suggested that
it was time to push on, as we still had a long way to go, and the shadows
were almost at their shortest.

Between us and the far hedge was a widish interval of fairly open grass,
bounded on the upper side by a regular thicket of hazel. As we crossed
this open space Crab suddenly drew my attention to a very odd-looking
erection which stood in a sort of bay in the hazel-brush. I had never
seen anything quite like it before, and, our curiosity thoroughly
aroused, we moved slowly and cautiously towards it.

‘’Pon my claws, I believe it’s a pheasant coop,’ I said at last.

‘There are no pheasants here,’ replied Crab. ‘Besides, it’s got no sides.’

No more it had. I saw that plainly as we approached it more closely. It
appeared to be a sort of sloping roof made of pieces of rough planking,
and propped above a hole in the ground.

Suddenly Crab stopped short. ‘What’s this?’ he exclaimed. I did not wait
to explain. A delicious morsel of white bread lay before me, and I fell
upon it and gobbled it up promptly. It was more than a year since I had
tasted such a luxury.

‘Is it good?’ inquired Crab curiously.

‘Bet your back teeth it is,’ I said.

‘Why, here’s another piece! I’ll try it,’ exclaimed my friend. He did so,
and approved greatly. I found a third, and presently we were racing in
short dashes up the queer-looking erection to which a trail of bread led
directly.

Inside the dug-out hollow below the sloping roof the ground was white
with crumbs.

‘Crab,’ I said, after a good stare at the whole thing, ‘I don’t quite
like the look of it.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘All I can say is, I don’t like it. I
wouldn’t go under the roof if I were you.’

‘Nonsense! Why should I chuck away the chance of a feed like this?’

Before I could object again he had jumped down and was busily engaged
with the bread. My mouth watered. I could see no sign of danger.
There was nothing to suggest a trap. Why should not I also enjoy the
delicacies? I was on the very verge of following Crab’s example; another
second and I should have been alongside of him, when suddenly, and
without the slightest warning, thump! down came the wooden roof, and
Crab was a prisoner beneath it. At the same instant there was a crash
among the hazel-bushes, a sharp yelp, and a brown-faced, bare-legged boy,
accompanied by a large mongrel, dashed down upon me.

I was off like a flash, and by a desperate effort gained the nearest
tree—an ancient pollard oak—which stood quite by itself at some distance
both from the hedge and the hazel-bushes. The dog bounded high against
the rough trunk, but I was safely out of his reach, and, curling myself
into the smallest possible compass, crouched in the gnarled top of the
club-like head of the tree.

‘Watch him, Tige!’ shouted the boy, and the dog at once crouched silently
at the foot of the tree, while his master walked to the trap. From my
elevated position I could watch it all, and, what was more, see plainly
an old sand-pit behind the hazel-bushes, with a tent at the bottom of it,
two children playing outside, and a couple of ponies grazing near by.

Wrapping his hand in his cap, the boy cautiously seized hold of my poor
friend. I, of course, supposed that he meant to make a captive of him,
but, to my horror, the young fiend wrung the unhappy Crab’s neck, and
marched off with him back to the camp.

‘Wot you got, Zeke?’ came a gruff voice from the tent. ‘A partridge?’

‘’Tain’t no partridge. ’Tis a squir’l. ’E’ll ait fine.’

I saw the elder ruffian seize poor Crab’s dead body, and then, ‘Pity us
ain’t got another,’ he said. ‘Two on ’em ’ud mek a nutty stew.’

‘There’s another atop o’ oak—tree. Tige’s watchin’ un.’

‘Get un down!’ was the father’s order.

‘You’ll ’ave to come an’ ’elp me,’ said the boy. ‘’Tis too ’igh for me to
climb.’

‘Mother, you skin this un,’ called the elder man.

A sallow-faced woman took Crab’s body from him, and then he and his son
came up out of the pit towards the oak.

[Illustration: THE DOG BOUNDED HIGH, BUT I WAS SAFELY OUT OF HIS REACH.]

I gave myself up for lost. Remember, the tree was a pollard, and, having
been lopped not more than four or five years before, its branches were
thin and straight. They provided no cover at all. The crown from which
they sprung was not more than twenty feet above the ground. Once my
enemies climbed it, there was no escape; for if I ran out to the end of
a branch and dropped I should undoubtedly fall into the yawning jaws of
Tige the dog. But the instinct of self-preservation is strong. Casting
round me desperately, I saw a small crevice in the knotted trunk-top. At
first it seemed far too small to hold me, but somehow or other I forced
myself through, though I scored my sides as I did so. My claws met no
foothold, I made a grasp at thin air, and fell flop half a dozen feet,
landing upon a bed of soft, rotten wood. When my eyes became accustomed
to the gloom, I saw that the trunk was completely hollow for a man’s
height from the top. It was not quite dark, for the daylight leaked
through various small crevices, but there was no hole large enough for a
man to put his hand through.

The scraping of boots on the rough outside bark jarred the whole hollow
trunk. Presently I heard a voice from below: ‘Where be ’e, Zeke?’

‘Can’t see un, vather!’ cried the boy, who was by the sound on the crown
of the oak.

‘That vool Tige’s let ’im go.’

‘I’ll lay ’e ain’t,’ piped the boy.

‘Where be ’e, then?’

Silence and more groping up above. I began to hope that the hole through
which I had passed might escape the sharp eyes of the boy.

No such luck.

‘’E’s down inside, vather. ’Ere be th’ ’ole.’

‘Put thy ’and down an’ pull un out.’

The light was cut off from above.

‘Her’s all ’ollow inside,’ cried the boy. ‘I can’t reach un.’

‘Cut a stick an’ put un through.’

A pause, and presently a long bough came poking down, which I easily
avoided. But—worse luck!—the boy’s quick ears heard me moving.

‘He’s here, vather. I heard un. Tell ee what. Us’ll smoke un out.’

Memory flashed back to the poachers and the suffocated pheasants. Now,
indeed, I was lost. In helpless terror I heard them piling leaves and
twigs below the tree, and then the click of a striking match.

Blue fumes began to eddy through a knot-hole, but the bed of rotten wood
below me was so thick and damp that they passed over my head and I was
still able to breathe.

I heard the man swearing, and then he called to his boy:

‘Zeke, fetch t’ chopper. Us ’ll have to cut un out.’

Soon there came a pounding on the outside of the trunk which
reverberated through the hollow, jarring me horribly. The outer crust was
of no great thickness, and could not resist their blows for very long.

Rotten wood, bits of rubbish of all kinds began to rain down upon me
through the smoke which still hung about the hollow interior of the tree.
Thinking any fate better than dying like a rat in a trap, I climbed back
up the wall of my refuge in an attempt to reach the knot-hole again.
Half suffocated and completely dazed, I did manage to struggle up to
it, got my paws on either side and tried to force my way through. Alas!
A splinter broke away from the rough wood at the edge of the hole, and
pinned me helplessly. I could get neither forward nor back.

Fate was too strong for me. I gave up all hope, and ceased to struggle.
In another minute at most the boy would find me, and I should share poor
Crab’s fate. I heard a crash as the chopper broke through the bark below,
and Zeke’s voice:

‘Vather, ’e be up top again.’

Then it seemed to me that a miracle happened. Instead of the old fellow’s
voice, the crisp, curt tones that cut the air were those of my one-time
master, Jack.

‘Hi, you fellows, what are you about?’

Down dropped Zeke. There followed a crash among the bushes. A short
interval. Would Jack find me? I struggled again furiously, but in vain.
The splinter held me tight, and the only result of my efforts was
exquisite pain.

‘I wonder what those gipsy chaps were after?’ came Jack’s voice. ‘I’d
better have a look.’

Fresh sounds of scrambling, and all of a sudden my master’s face over the
edge of the gnarled oak crown.

‘Why, it’s a squirrel!’

Summoning all my remaining energies I gave a pitiful choked squeak, a
feeble attempt at the cry I used to call him with in the long-gone days
at the Hall.

‘What! No, it can’t be! It’s absurd! And yet’—Jack’s voice rose to a
shout—‘by Jove, _it is Nipper_!’ I felt his hand round me, his touch as
gentle as ever. ‘You poor little chap, how did you come here? And stuck
tight, too! Never mind, poor old Nipper boy. I’ll get you out all right.
Just wait a jiffy.’

Out came his knife, and with the utmost gentleness he cut the wood away
all round. In another minute I was free, and safe in his hand.

‘What, hurt, old chap? I must get it out.’ With wonderful tenderness and
deftness he pulled out the sharp splinter. ‘There, it’s not much. Only a
skin wound. How in the name of all that’s wonderful, did you come here,
half a county away from the Hall?’

As he spoke he slipped me into the pocket of his Norfolk jacket and
dropped quickly out of the tree.

When he took me out again we were in the terraced garden of the house
which I had seen by the river. Jack ran up the drive and burst into the
house, shouting at the top of his voice:

‘Harry, where are you?’

Next minute out ran his brother.

If ever I longed to be able to talk man-talk, then was the time! How
astonished they all were, for Mabel and Mrs. Fortescue soon joined the
boys, and were full of the same amazement at what they considered my
strange and mysterious reappearance. I always wonder if they knew how
much stranger I thought it at the time.

And yet it was simple enough. The house belonged to Mrs. Fortescue’s
brother, a wealthy bachelor whose hobby it was to travel all over the
world. It was he who had brought Lops, the flying squirrel, home from
Mexico, and Joey, the cockatoo, from West Africa. He had lent the
Fortescues his house, and there they were living, and there Jack had
joined them for one of his brief holidays.

As my old master took me up to his room that night, ‘Old chap,’ he said,
‘you and I are not going to part any more, even if I have to take you
back to London town.’

No more we have. He did take me back to London, but it was only for a few
weeks. For the Fortescues came into some money unexpectedly.

That is two years ago. Now we are back at the dear old Hall. The new
tenant with his band-box son, his ginger-whiskered keeper, his tame
pheasants and his barbed wire, are things of the evil past. As for me,
I live in honoured liberty in the Hall grounds. Last year I married
again, and I have three fine sons who are all nearly as fond of Jack and
his family as their father. Visitors come from a distance to see Jack’s
‘furry family,’ as they call us. We run in a body at his approach down
from the elm-trees to smother him with caresses.

Indeed, he deserves our love. Would that all other humans were as good to
squirrels as he is.

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      BY H. PERRY ROBINSON               BY J. C. TREGARTHEN

  With 12 full-page Illustrations   With 12 full-page Illustrations
  in Colour by J. VAN OORT          in Colour by COUNTESS HELENA GLEICHEN

        THE LIFE STORY OF                 THE LIFE STORY OF
              A CAT                             A RAT
          BY VIOLET HUNT                  BY G. M. A. HEWETT

  With 12 full-page Illustrations   With 12 full-page Illustrations
  in Colour by ADOLPH BIRKENRUTH    in Colour by STEPHEN BAGHOT DE LA BERE

        THE LIFE STORY OF                 THE LIFE STORY OF
              A DOG                          A SQUIRREL
         BY G. E. MITTON                  BY T. C. BRIDGES

  With 12 full-page Illustrations   With 12 full-page Illustrations
  in Colour by JOHN WILLIAMSON      in Colour by ALLAN STEWART

                               PUBLISHED BY
            A. & C. BLACK, 4, 5, & 6, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

       *       *       *       *       *

                          WHAT THE PRESS SAYS OF
                          ANIMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

             (_For volumes, prices, etc., see previous page_)

‘Embodies a realistic and highly-interesting life story of the fox as
told by the fox himself. Mr. Tregarthen knows his subject, and he knows
how to write about it. From the first page to the dramatic and pitiful
closing incident, when the hunter leaves the fox to his well-earned
rest, the interest in his sorrows and joys, his adventures, flights, and
escapes, never flags.’—_Literary World._

‘The story is a really fine one, full of true feeling for the wild,
easy to read, and hard to put down. It has several excellent coloured
illustrations, and will rank as one of the most desirable gift-books of
the season.’—_Guardian._

‘Miss Hunt undoubtedly understands cats as well as women, and she uses
her intimate knowledge with discretion; she chastens her revelations of
feline inwardness with a commendable economy and sense of fitness. Loki,
the smoke-blue Persian who unfolds the tale, is distinctly attractive.
Towards the close, indeed, the story almost rises to a problem
novel.’—_Athenaum._

‘He is a delightful creature, and his autobiography will appeal
to cat-lovers, as it has more than a touch of feline nature in
it.’—_Spectator._

‘Will charm many children.’—_Athenaum._

‘Mr. Robinson’s work is excellent.... Any parent who wishes to find
out whether his children take an interest in animals should place this
book in their hands; the boy who can stop reading it without reluctance
may at once be declared to have no interest in natural history. The
illustrations are good, and add much to the attractiveness of the
book.’—_Aberdeen Journal._

‘A work which we commend to young and old alike.’—_Athenaum._

‘A wonderfully interesting story—one which boys will devour with
eagerness, while their elders may learn from it much that will be new to
them.’—_Scotsman._

‘A curious and varied story. Will be read with unfailing
interest.’—_Educational Times._

‘No book could give more delight to a dog-lover than this beautiful
volume.’—_World._

The _Observer_ says: ‘That a great many children, and their elders, too,
take a continuous interest in the life stories of animals has been proved
again and again, and therefore the idea of this series is one which is
sure to commend itself to a large circle of readers. These volumes show
that the happy idea has been very happily carried out.’

                               PUBLISHED BY
            A. & C. BLACK, 4, 5, & 6, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

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