T. C. Bridges

“ 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 [102] branches, playing all manner of practical jokes on one another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [212] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [18] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”