Toaff's Way

by Cynthia Voigt

  And that— Was it common sense that made room for this idea? Or was it the first gray light of day spreading up into the falling rain that was almost enough to make a miserable little squirrel whuffle? Any squirrel knew it was better to be alive than dead. But it kept raining, all morning, and Toaff couldn’t make himself leave the sodden nest. He was tired, he was hungry, he was wet and cold, and he didn’t want to move. Why should he move from one wet place to another? What else could he do but wait, and wait, and wait still longer?

  He hadn’t known he could be so uncomfortable.

  When the rain at last stopped, Toaff scurried down to the ground and over to the stone wall. Then, as if it had been waiting for the rain to get out of its way, the sun appeared, to warm Toaff’s fur and the stones under his paws. He found no more than a few dried seeds, but he was hungry enough to be happy with that. He sat on the wall, chewing hard. He looked at the branches beyond the top of the nest-house. He wondered what he should do, and he tried not to remember the piles of stores he’d lost, and he couldn’t forget them. But this caused him to think about his crowded den, with so many squirrels chuk-chukking together, and telling stories and warning one another, and this led him to finally remember something useful: He remembered a voice making fun of Churrchurrs because they lived in burrows.

  In burrows dug in the ground! Burrows dug in the ground among the roots of trees!

  Toaff scrambled back over the rocks to the older apple tree, to study its roots. Looking carefully, he could see a place where two fat roots joined the trunk, leaving a little hollow on the ground between them. Toaff set right to work, digging at damp dirt to make it deeper, then gathering dry grass to pile up in it, to make a nest where a squirrel could sleep. That night, if it rained, he would be protected. That night he would be able to sleep.

  What Toaff didn’t understand until it was too late was that he didn’t have an actual burrow. An actual burrow is an underground den. What he had was a nest half sunk into the ground among a tree’s roots. He might as well have been trying to sleep out in the middle of a field. What kept Toaff awake that second night was not rain. It was waiting for some fox or cat or raccoon to spring at him from out of the darkness, and sink its sharp teeth into him.

  As soon as it was light, Toaff fled to the top of the tree. He hoped that from its branches he might see something, anything, useful. But there was just the nest he had already tried and his own little hollow. Neither one of these was a place where a squirrel wanted to live. Toaff had no place to sleep. And it had started to rain, again. And he was hungry. He decided he’d have to find those trees on the other side of the nest-house. But first, he had to eat.

  A few small buds, fed by rain and encouraged by sun, had come out at the very tips of the twigs at the narrowest ends of this tree’s thinnest branches. It was dangerous to try for them, but what choice did he have? He was weak with both hunger and sleeplessness. That was no way to start off on a trek. Slowly, cautiously, Toaff edged out along a branch. There—softly, gently—he gathered one bud, two, barely moving at all to reach them, then three and four, holding them all in his mouth. They were hard and bitter, but they were food. It was risky to turn around but it was even riskier to back up. So, with the most delicate movements of which a squirrel is capable, as if trying not to disturb the air around him, Toaff rotated.

  That was when he saw it. Just below where he was balanced, at the end of a short fat stump where a branch must have been torn off, Toaff saw a round hole that maybe was an entrance. This was so surprising and welcome a sight that he almost slipped from his perch. He almost spat out the buds he had just gathered, and at such risk. As carefully as he had made his way out, he made his way back to the trunk. He chewed and swallowed hastily, tasting nothing of what was in his mouth, then he went to take a look.

  Because if there was a hollow, it had to be unoccupied, otherwise he would have seen some other squirrel. Because if there was any kind of a hollow, he could make it large enough to hold a nest that would be out of the rain and hidden from predators. Because he might have found a safe place.

  Early spring was just as bad as everyone had said. Toaff went to bed hungry and stayed hungry all during nights that seemed endless. He woke up hungry and wished he could go back to sleep. He had to forage long and hard just to find enough food to give him the strength to go out foraging when he woke up hungry the next morning.

  Early spring was rainy days and weak sunlight, fog that kept you in your nest for fear of hidden predators, followed by long dark nights trapped in your den with your hunger and your bad thoughts. Nothing felt right in early spring, and it went on and on and on, day after day after day, until Toaff almost couldn’t remember what winter had been like, in a big den with piles of stores nearby.

  Then came a morning when everything—sky and trees, even the dirt drive and even the black crow that soared over the nest-house, kaah-kaahing—everything was as bright as if the whole farm was newly made. The nest-house shone bright white and every pine and fir shone too, shone dark green. The grass shone pale green, while the patches of bare earth out of which it was grown shone brown. The air tasted of never-before-seen things. Toaff breathed in that air, and looked across the top of the nest-house to those high branches. What if I—?

  But the roaring and grinding of a machine started up. The machine was in the pasture where his pine had stood, which was too close. He decided to stay where he was. All that day the machine roared and all day long Toaff sat trembling on an apple branch, hoping that nothing terrible was about to happen.

  The machine was carrying the human and dragging behind it a wide dark path of fresh dirt, dragging dirt back and forth, until the whole pasture was changed. Then the machine went away. When it had gone, some crows called, Kaah-kaah. What might they be saying? Could they be speaking to him? They flew down to hop around on the dark surface and sometimes dart their beaks down into the dirt, and took off again, Kaah-kaah. Saying, Your turn or maybe Food here! Toaff went to find out.

  In the pasture, bugs squirmed up and down through the new dirt, peeking out, crawling in. Hungry as he was, he wasn’t hungry enough to eat a bug, but lots of old, flavorless seeds poked out of the dirt. Those Toaff did eat, until his stomach was finally full and he could return to the safety of his nest, to not be hungry all night and to make plans. He didn’t want to stay in the apple tree any longer.

  But that was the night he first heard a new, and strange, voice. The voice came out of the big white nest-house. This was a long voice that ran along without stopping, like a squirrel on a branch. It was a slender sound that swayed gently down and then floated up into the air. It was curved and silvery, like the tail of a squirrel. The sound wound around him. He couldn’t imagine what name such a sound might have. For as long as it went on, Toaff lay with his nose resting on the entryway to his tiny den and listened, and listened, until it stopped and was gone.

  The sound had come from the nest-house. So was it human? But when the human talked to the dogs, his voice didn’t sound like this. But if it wasn’t human, what else could it be? Could a creature make sounds so very different from its usual voice? That would be like Toaff being able to kaah like a crow, which he definitely couldn’t, or yark. But humans weren’t like other animals, as Toaff already knew.

  This was made even clearer to him the very next morning. As he was squeezing out of his nest, he heard the crows calling. They could have been telling him to Look, look! so he did, and saw a new human, who stood on a low pile of wood sticking out from the front of the nest-house. This human was different from the man—a female? A mate? Her front legs waved in the air, graceful as a squirrel’s tail, and white things flew out of them, scattering down onto the ground. The crows flew up, kaah-kaahing, to drive her back. When she was gone, they landed in the grass and hopped about, stabbing at the ground with their beaks, eating. Eating what? Toaff sat on a branch, wondering, watching, an
d after not very long, the crows flew off.

  What if I—?

  He scrambled down the trunk and dashed across to that part of the grass where the crows had been. He was too hungry to be as careful as he should have, but nothing unlucky happened and his curiosity was rewarded by pale chunks of something that smelled like food lying among the blades of grass. He took a bite and it was good, although not at all in the way a nut or seed was good, and it was much softer even than a horse chestnut. He gobbled one down quickly, then a second, and then, finally noticing how unprotected he was, he picked up another of the squares in his teeth, to carry it up close to the nest-house. In that protected place, he sat on his haunches to enjoy eating.

  He was enjoying it slowly, chewing, tasting, swallowing, enjoying it a lot, when two things happened in quick succession and he forgot about food:

  First, he saw a flash of movement on the far side of the big white nest-house. Was it a gray squirrel? Before he could be sure, he was distracted by more movement on that same side of the nest-house, and this was the slow, low movement of a hunt.

  Toaff may have never before in his life seen a cat, but he knew these two were cats. So did the watching crows, who kaah-kaahed an alarm from the air. The might-be-a-squirrel disappeared. The cats bounded after.

  Toaff fled back to the apple tree.

  By the time he was safely perched on a branch, the grass was empty and the nest-house quiet, all of its many entrances dark. No crows hovered in the sky. The cats were gone. Toaff guessed that if it was a squirrel he’d seen, it must live in those trees on the far side of the nest-house. He guessed that squirrel might also have been looking for food, and that made him notice how full his stomach was. That made him think how good it was not to be hungry, and that made him wonder if he could hope that early spring was over.

  Not many days later, Toaff stuck his head out into bright morning air and believed—for five amazed breaths, or ten—that in the night he had been carried up into the sky. Tiny puffy white clouds had appeared all around him—beneath him, beside him, and above him, too—and the air smelled entirely different. The air smelled wonderful! He had no name for what the air smelled of, but he figured out soon enough that it wasn’t clouds around him. It was some new part of the apple tree. His apple tree was filled with little white bursts, not as white as snow but thick as snow could be, and they were the source of that wonderful smell.

  Toaff sniffed and sniffed and whuffled to himself.

  He wasn’t surprised when Sadie and Angus and even the mate came to admire what the apple tree had done. “Spring!” yarked Angus, and “Play!” yarked Sadie.

  But spring had begun long before that day, Toaff thought, even before the human had chainsawed his pine into pieces. How could the dogs not know that?

  The mate pulled down one of the branches and put her nose into it. Then she stretched her front leg up into the tree to grab a higher branch.

  Toaff fled up the trunk.

  The mate let the branch go and it snapped back, shorter than it had been. She had broken it, like the wind breaking off the top of the dead pine. She reached out again.

  Toaff couldn’t go any higher.

  “Flowers,” yarked Sadie, but Angus knew better. “Blossoms,” he told her, then Sadie yarked a question, “Sure?” and Angus answered, “Yes.”

  The mate pulled down on a branch. What if I—?

  Toaff ran down the other side of the trunk to go past the reaching paw, but then, What if she—? He ran back up.

  “Squirrel!” yarked Sadie, and the mate broke a second branch. “Squirrel?” Sadie asked.

  The mate turned around and spoke to the dogs and Angus yarked, “Come!”

  “Hello, squirrel!” Sadie yarked, and they all went away.

  It was not much later that Toaff heard the dogs again, this time in the distance. “Go!” Angus yarked. “Go there.” His voice was bossy and his yarking was answered by voices Toaff had never heard before. The sounds came from off beyond the nest-barn, many voices, all mixed together, all saying the same thing, whatever that was.

  Sadie yarked, “Do what Angus says! And me, too!”

  Those new voices made a sound full of bau. Angus yarked, “No! Go there!” and bau-bau-bau, the animals answered, but not as if they were complaining, or frightened, or hungry. It sounded as if the animals just wanted to be making their noise. Gradually, all the voices faded away into the distance, and however hard Toaff listened, he could no longer hear them.

  All of that was strange and wonderful enough, but the next day something even stranger and more wonderful happened. The next day, when a bright sun had had all morning to warm the air, the mate returned. She brought Sadie with her and something dangled off of one of her front legs. Although, now that Toaff thought of it, humans always went about on their back legs, so Toaff didn’t know if the front things were actually legs at all.

  The mate and the dog were followed by a small animal, which Toaff thought must be human as well because it, too, moved on its back legs and, like the mate, had a round furry head and no tail. From his perch among the leaves and flowers-or-blossoms, watching the three of them, he couldn’t help noticing how frequently the small human fell over. When that happened, the mate helped it back up.

  With all that falling and helping, their progress across the grass was so slow that Toaff had to conclude that they had no predators to watch out for. Any squirrel who moved that slowly wouldn’t last long. He watched their approach, wondering what the mate was up to now, trying to decide if he needed to flee. “Pik-ik,” Sadie yarked to the small human, and Toaff wondered what she was talking about. The mate sat down right under his tree and pulled out of the thing she carried what must have been food, since in not very long they were putting it into their mouths. So humans carried their stores around with them, Toaff thought. He wondered if that was something a squirrel might want to try to do, although he didn’t see how. He kept on watching. You never knew when you might learn something useful.

  He saw that a lot of the little one’s food fell into the grass. When that happened, the mate gave it some more. He saw that sometimes the little one pushed its food into Sadie’s face. “Sturf,” said Sadie. “Sturf, sturf,” as the food was shoved into her mouth. So humans ate what dogs ate, Toaff thought.

  Watching the little one feed the dog, the mate made noises as if she was trying to cough, gha-gha. When Sadie’s long tongue came out to lick her own nose clean, the little one clapped its front paws together. Then Sadie stuck her nose into the little one’s face and licked. The big one said gha-gha and Sadie yarked, “Good!” They sat eating like that for a while, after which the little one began to wander around. The little one tried to run after Sadie, and when it fell over, the dog would come back to lick at its face, and then the little one would cough, too, gha-gha-gha, and the big one would cough and Sadie would jump back and forth. “Play!”

  Angus interrupted them. “Come on, Sadie!” he yarked.

  “Not now,” Sadie answered. “Helping Missus and baby.”

  Baby? Was the little one a baby? A human baby? Toaff hadn’t known that humans had babies, like squirrels did.

  “Mister said!” yarked Angus.

  Was Mister the other big human in the white nest-house?

  “Not now!” Sadie yarked, then she asked, “Why?”

  All the yarking drove the baby back to the Missus mate with the kind of unhappy sounds any frightened baby animal makes. Missus said something loud and the dogs went away and then, in a day filled with surprises, the most surprising thing of all happened. Missus began to talk, but not in the voice she had used before. This new talking was that long line of sound the color of squirrels’ tails, or silver moonlight. Missus talked and talked, winding the line of sound around her baby, and the baby grew quiet. It nestled up close to her until she wrapped her front legs around it, like a long
, soft tail. Then she stopped the new talking, stood up, reached down for the thing she kept her stores in, and carried her baby across to the nest-house.

  Not until then did Toaff notice the smell. Something that smelled like a squirrel could eat it had been left behind in the grass under his tree. He scurried down and found a few apple bits and some crumbs of the soft white food. Toaff ate until he was full enough, then decided to carry the extra up to his den. They could be stores for him. They wouldn’t be as long-lasting as nuts and seeds, he knew, but still, they would be food for the next day or two.

  He was coming back down for his second mouthful when the crows arrived. Kaah-kaah! called the two crows who flew down to land just under Toaff’s tree.

  What a day this was! Toaff had never been so close to a crow before. They were bigger than he’d thought and their black feathers lay smooth as sky against their bodies. They kept pointing at the ground with their black beaks, until he had to whuffle and call out to them, “I know, I already know. But thank you.”

  They didn’t even look up. They kaah-kaahed quietly, as if discussing something. Then, moving along the hoppy way crows do, their heads jabbing forward with every hop, they came out from under the blossom-or-flower-filled branches, spread their wings, and rose up, into the air, calling back to him, Kaah-kaah! Maybe to say, What are you waiting for?