“The apple tree was closer,” Toaff said, and that was true. Also true was that he didn’t want to live in the same nest with Braff. Then he remembered a better argument. “My littermate came back to tell me they were moving across the road.” The Lucky Ones didn’t seem to understand what that meant, so he told them, “The road is at the end of the drive and it’s more dangerous than anyplace else on the farm. Everybody said. Machines on the road are a lot more dangerous than they are on the drive.”
After a short silence, “I think Toaff can stay,” Mroof announced. “What if the reason the humans cut up his pine tree was so he would have to leave it, and find us?”
“Maybe. But what if they were trying to get rid of his whole den but he escaped?” Pneef argued.
“And he had all those stores to eat at the end of winter. And he found a nest in the apple tree.”
“I found a den,” Toaff corrected. He wanted Mroof to know the exact true way things had been. “I built my own nest. It’s small, because the den is so small,” he admitted.
Tzaaf had made up his mind. “I agree with Mroof. I think he’s supposed to be a Lucky One.”
“I can help forage,” Toaff offered, which set them off whuffling again.
“Why would we need help foraging when the humans feed us?” Pneef asked. “Look,” she said, and led him to the high edge of the drey. Mroof and Tzaaf followed. The four squirrels stood in a row on their back legs to peer through leaves in the direction of the white nest-house.
“See that little nest-house on a pole? With a roof of its own?”
What Toaff saw looked like a thin young tree with not one single branch on it. At its top was a nest no bigger than his den in the apple tree, without walls but with its own top, like a human nest. Its floor was covered by yellowy-brown bumps.
“That’s our feeder,” Tzaaf announced.
“Those are seeds in it,” Mroof told him. “Have you ever tasted seeds? If you haven’t? You’ll see, they taste better than anything.”
“The humans keep the feeder full of seeds for us,” Pneef told him.
“We share it with the birds,” Tzaaf said, and while they stood watching, a robin flew down from high in their maple to land in the feeder. For a few minutes, it perched there, pecking and eating.
Mroof explained, “Humans want us to share.”
“Do the crows eat there too?” Toaff wondered. He never would have guessed that crows were good sharers.
“Not crows,” Pneef told him. “Why would humans care about crows? It’s the nice birds they want us to share with, the sparrows and robins, the juncos, the warblers. Nobody cares about crows.”
Toaff did, but he decided not to say what he was thinking, because squirrels don’t like to be told things they don’t agree with. When you lived alone, he thought, nobody quarreled. He wondered if he wouldn’t prefer to go back to his own den after all. But the Lucky Ones had more to tell him.
“The humans like to watch us eat,” Mroof said. “Sometimes when we are eating? They come to an entrance and knock on it, to say hello.”
“When it’s winter they hang suet on the low branches, because suet keeps you warm in the cold,” Tzaaf told him.
Toaff couldn’t imagine any of this. This was too wonderful to be believed: a big drey to live in, food put out for you, being warm inside a human nest all winter long, and other squirrels to play with and tell stories with. Maybe he would have to be careful not to argue, but even so, he did want to live here. Also, he could tell that Mroof really wanted him to stay and he liked being wanted.
“We’re the Lucky Ones,” Mroof said, again, “and you’re probably one too, because you got away from Fox. So you should stay.” They returned to sitting in the drey, but this time the three of them were all spread around, not in a row, and even Pneef agreed, sort of.
“We can try him,” she said.
Spring days were warm. In spring, even the rain fell warm. The Lucky Ones, and Toaff, spent the sunny hours playing chase-me and find-me, or jumping from tree to tree, racing around trunks, then jumping again, with frequent stops at the feeder. The humans and the dogs were sometimes outside and sometimes inside, but they didn’t bother the squirrels. The one danger was the cats, but the squirrels all kept a watchful eye out and, really, nothing interfered with their enjoyment of each spring day.
Toaff had never had such a comfortable life. He hoped that he was showing them he really belonged in their drey. The longer he was there, the more he wanted to stay. He noticed as much as he could about how they thought Lucky Ones should act so he could be that, too, so they would feel he was just like them.
He himself felt most like a real Lucky One on those occasional rainy days, or when a chilly wind blew, and they all stayed in the dry warmth of the drey to chuk about one thing or another, or tell stories. The Lucky Ones knew a lot of stories, some of them familiar to Toaff and some new. He listened happily to all of them, without saying anything. On the third such day, Toaff finally asked about Tzaaf’s scar. It was Tzaaf’s story, but it was Mroof who told it.
“I was in the drey and Pneef was here with me, but everyone else wasn’t because they wanted to see if behind the nest-barn was a safer place than here, because of the cats. We weren’t yet strong enough to go so far. Tzaaf thought he saw Missus putting out bread, and he wanted to have some before the crows took it, and we told him not to go, but he didn’t listen. We did, we warned you,” Mroof said to Tzaaf, who seemed to be about to protest.
Tzaaf kept quiet.
Mroof said, “So we saw Snake first, because he came along our side of the nest-house, when Tzaaf was just going around the corner. We chukked, as loud as we could, both of us, together. We made a lot of noise,” she told Toaff proudly. “And he heard us.”
“But Snake was between me and the trees,” Tzaaf told Toaff.
“Scary,” Toaff said. “Really scary. How’d you get away?”
Tzaaf shook his head and shifted his position, to show Toaff his whole long scar.
“He didn’t,” Mroof said. “He couldn’t. A young squirrel has no chance to outrun a cat and there were no trees to climb. We wanted to help, but what could we do? It was terrible because we knew what would happen. It was worse than terrible because it didn’t happen right away. At first, Tzaaf was too frightened to move. We could see that and we didn’t blame him one bit. Snake was crouched down in front of Tzaaf, and his tail was waving and he hissed. He liked watching Tzaaf be so frightened, so he didn’t spring right away.”
“He just hissed at me,” Tzaaf added.
Toaff could imagine how the squirrel must have felt, just waiting for the cat to spring, that hissing voice and those staring eyes. “What happened? How did you—?”
“Then Snake attacked!” Mroof said. “We could see his claws, even from up here, and Tzaaf screamed!”
Pneef spoke then, to say, “That was the worst thing, when he was screaming.”
Toaff had heard that mouse’s cry and mice were littler than squirrels, a lot littler and much quieter too. He could imagine what Mroof and Pneef had seen, and heard.
“But Missus had been there! Tzaaf was right, she was putting out food. She said something loud. She was much louder than us, wasn’t she, Pneef? But Snake didn’t pay any attention to her, but then Mister came through the entrance and the dogs came yarking, both of them, yarking and yarking, and Mister was carrying something and he threw brown water from it down on Snake and Tzaaf, and Snake hated that. He backed up, hissing. Hissing at Mister! We thought he was going to attack Mister, he was that mad.”
“He had his back all arched and his hair was sticking out,” Pneef added.
“But Mister just said something loud and waved what he was carrying at Snake—”
“But no more brown water came out—”
“—and Snake ran away. Humans can make cats
do what they want them to, because they’re so big,” Mroof explained. “So Tzaaf was saved.” She waited a minute before she said, “But Tzaaf didn’t stand up.”
“I couldn’t,” Tzaaf said. “I can’t even remember what happened, I was just…afraid and…I couldn’t move. They were right there, both of the humans, and looking at me and their voices were so loud….”
That, Toaff didn’t want to imagine.
“But you know what Missus did?” Mroof asked. “Missus sat right down beside Tzaaf, but not too close, and she stayed sitting there.”
“Looking at me,” Tzaaf added.
“We came as far down the trunk as we dared,” Mroof said. “We were calling to you, remember?”
“Telling you to get up, asking you if you were dead,” Pneef said.
“Which I wasn’t, but it began to hurt, and I could smell my own blood. And after a while, I could get up and I could go over to the tree and climb it, and I don’t know how I did that, but I did it.” There was amazement in his voice as he said, “I think Missus wanted to watch me until I was safe. I think that’s why she sat there.”
“So Snake wouldn’t come back. Or Fox,” Mroof said.
Toaff said, “You’re lucky to be alive, Tzaaf.”
Tzaaf nodded his agreement. “I only am because Missus and Mister helped me, because they take care of us.”
“So when the rest didn’t come back and we couldn’t go after them because Tzaaf couldn’t climb down, or run, or jump,” Mroof said, “we stayed too. They said they’d come back before winter.”
“They said they’d come back but they never did,” Pneef told him. “So we know something bad must have happened to them. It was lucky we didn’t go with them.”
“Which is another reason we’re the Lucky Ones,” Mroof concluded.
“You certainly are,” Toaff agreed. He wanted to be there too, with them in that drey, being lucky.
In the drey, in the company of the Lucky Ones, Toaff didn’t mind a rainy day. The Lucky Ones knew all kinds of stories and Toaff of course never said he already knew some of them. Squirrels never mind hearing a good story over and over, especially the oldest ones, about squirrels so long dead that nobody could even say what part of the farm they had inhabited. Their favorite old story was the one about swimming squirrels.
In the story, the squirrels crossed a pond to escape a family of foxes that had moved into their woods. “They could swim—well, all squirrels can,” said Mroof. “Just, most of us don’t want to have to. But those squirrels ran right into the water and swam, and it was nighttime, too, but the moon made a path, to show them the way. They swam and swam and they were getting tired, especially the babies. Then the old wise squirrel, the same one who knew about the woods across the pond, had another idea.”
“It wasn’t him,” Pneef corrected her. “It was the youngest one. It’s always the youngest ones who have the new ideas.”
“You’re both wrong. It was a mother, because the babies were in danger,” said Tzaaf.
Toaff knew what a pond was—a gigantic puddle. He was picturing what it would look like—squirrels crossing a pond at night in the silver moonlight. He didn’t care who had had the idea. Old Criff hadn’t ever told that part and Toaff thought the story was better without it.
“That wise old squirrel raised his tail up, out of the water,” Mroof said. “He raised it up high and spread it out wide and the wind blew at it from behind and pushed him forward.”
“It was the youngest one who did that,” Pneef repeated.
“No, it was one of the mothers,” Tzaaf insisted.
“Then,” Mroof said loudly, with a stern look first at Pneef and then at Tzaaf, “they all raised their tails and spread them out wide and the wind pushed all of them forward, to their new territory, on the opposite bank.”
That could happen. Toaff could imagine how it might work. But he wondered, “Didn’t the foxes chase after them?” In his experience, foxes didn’t give up easily.
“Foxes can’t swim,” Mroof declared. Then she asked, “Can they?”
“They don’t have fat tails either,” Tzaaf said. “Do they?”
The Lucky Ones had never seen a fox, so Toaff could tell them, “They have long, bushy tails but I don’t know about the swimming.”
“You’ve seen a fox? Weren’t you afraid?”
“Humans aren’t afraid of foxes, did you know that?”
“Humans aren’t afraid of anything.”
“You saw a real fox?”
So Toaff had his own story to tell, first about a fox tracking a mouse under the snow and then about how to save a mouse from a fox. After that he started to tell them about escaping from the orange-headed giant with his chain saw. “That must have been Mister,” they explained.
“Did he have Angus with him? The black-and-white dog?”
“Nobody but Mister would know how to cut a tree into pieces.”
“So I fled. To look for a nest in the apple trees,” Toaff concluded.
“I’ve been there,” Pneef said. “They’re not fit to live in. You’re lucky we found you.”
“But it wasn’t a chain saw,” Tzaaf told him. “It was a lawn mower. A lawn mower is what Mister uses to cut the grass. That’s his cutting-down tool. It makes a lot of noise, just the way you described, but on this side of the nest-house it doesn’t stop until it’s finished.”
“He’d never use it on our trees,” Mroof promised them all. “Or on the feeder either,” she added because she wanted it to be true. “Otherwise, how would they be sure we had food when there’s snow?”
Maybe it was a lawn mower, not a chain saw, Toaff thought. Why would Braff know the name of a machine better than these Lucky Ones? Except, he thought, why would these squirrels, who never went far from their own drey, know more than Braff?
But he knew better than to ask the Lucky Ones those questions.
The question was soon settled in Braff’s favor when the four squirrels watched Mister follow a noisy machine around and around on the grass near his nest-house. He held on to its two long legs so it wouldn’t get away from him as it whined and pulled and sometimes cried out with a quick sharp sound. Most of the time it just whined, on and on, for so long that Toaff wanted to run off, run away, run anywhere, just to escape the sound of it. This was not a chain saw and Toaff was glad to be able to tell something to the Lucky Ones. “If that’s the lawn mower, the chain saw is something else,” he told them, when the machine had finally pulled Mister around the corner to continue its whining somewhere farther off.
“Can you believe how stubborn he is?” Pneef asked Mroof and Tzaaf. Then she asked Toaff, in the kind of voice a mother uses with her baby when he is being very silly, “Why would a human need two different machines for cutting things down?”
“I don’t know that, but the machine that cut down my tree didn’t look or sound like this one, and they told me it was a chain saw,” Toaff answered.
“What they?” Pneef asked. “They who? Do those theys of yours live close to humans like we do?” She turned to Tzaaf and Mroof and said, “He always thinks he knows better than us.”
Toaff didn’t understand why Pneef thought that. Had he argued when the Lucky Ones told him rules? (“Don’t chase birds away from the feeder, the humans want to see them.” “Don’t come too close to the nest-house, they don’t like that.” “Do what we tell you, we know what humans want.”) No, he hadn’t argued, not one word, even though he sometimes wanted to. Some of the rules made no sense. Why shouldn’t a squirrel forage at night if he was hungry? Why were they supposed to stay away from the humans, who must want them to stay close, because otherwise why would they put out so much food? Why have a rule about the dogs’ food if you never saw the dogs eating?
The reason he didn’t argue was simple: The Lucky Ones didn’t like to be disagreed
with and Toaff wanted to be one of the Lucky Ones. He wanted to live in the drey high up in the maple tree. He wanted to eat at the feeder. That was why he didn’t insist about the chain saw even though he now knew for sure there were two different machines. But why couldn’t Toaff be right about even one thing? Why couldn’t he have his own idea about some one thing?
Every time he turned around, it seemed, there was another rule. “Don’t leave this side of the nest-house.”
“I used to live on the other side,” Toaff pointed out.
“And look what happened,” Pneef said.
Tzaaf explained, “If they wanted us on the other side, they wouldn’t have Snake and Fox living over there.”
Mroof added, “This is the nicest side. And the safest. And it has the feeder.”
“You can go anywhere you want to, on this side,” Tzaaf told him.
“Except an entrance,” Pneef said, so quickly that Toaff began to be curious about what there might be, after an entrance, inside. He wondered but did not ask, even though if any squirrels knew the answer to that question, it would be the Lucky Ones.
“We don’t want to bother the humans. Not ever,” Pneef told him, with so stern a look that he wondered if she could somehow hear everything he didn’t say out loud. “For one thing, humans take care of us and we’re grateful. But also, imagine what they could do if they got angry.”
“What would they do?” Toaff wondered.
“I don’t want to find out,” Tzaaf said.
“Whatever they do, it’s because they want to take care of us,” Mroof explained, adding, “Anyway, I’m hungry. Is anyone else hungry?”
Toaff followed them out of the drey without saying anything more. He didn’t want to quarrel with the Lucky Ones. Maybe they didn’t know as much as they thought they did, but they were right about one thing—they were definitely lucky.
When day became a word that stretched out so far ahead of them that there was time for everything, eating and playing and chattering and leaping, the squirrels knew that summer had arrived. “Well,” they said to one another and “I guess,” before they went back to eating and playing and chattering and leaping. Toaff enjoyed all of those things, and he enjoyed the company of others, but he also kept wondering about those entrances. Of course he was curious. He didn’t know what they were for, because the humans went in and out of just one of them, but why else would they want to make so many holes in the walls of their nest? Of course he remembered that he had been told to stay away, and he stayed away. Just as of course, he kept on wondering.