Toaff almost trembled himself off his pole, in his relief. But he didn’t. He waited, shivering, until they were gone, and then he waited a lot longer, until the thick, sleeping silence of night convinced him he could descend, and return safely to his own safe den.
After that, Toaff stuck close to home. On long, hot summer days and during the warm summer rains, he chewed away at the fir and carried in more mouthfuls of grasses and leaves, until he had made himself a comfortable nest in a den that was now big enough for a full-grown squirrel and his winter stores. That done, he then discovered that there was good foraging everywhere on this side of the nest-house. The pile of dirt turned out to be filled with food, and so was the area where the dogs ate every morning, spilling brown things and water. The crows’ kaah-kaahing had called his attention to both of those places, probably saying Food here! but whether telling one another or for the benefit of a nearby squirrel, Toaff didn’t know. What he did know was that from the pile to his tree was an easy run, and that he could escape to safety behind the wooden wall-with-holes, if he had to. He could stand the stink of mouse, if it was a matter of life or death. His life or his death. It turned out that he didn’t care if the crows meant him to know about the food; the important thing was to know that food was to be found in those places.
The garden also was a safe place to be, in daylight. The cats seemed uninterested in it, Missus and the baby were the only humans who went there, and the one animal was Sadie. Even though there was no food of real interest to him in the garden, he liked to perch on a pole and watch the comings and goings of humans and animals and machines at the nest-house and nest-barn.
It was probably inevitable that he’d be noticed. And it was not surprising at all that it was Sadie who first saw him.
That morning Sadie was yarking “Goodbye! Good luck!” to Angus and Mister, who were being taken down the driveway by a machine. “Goodbye! Goodbye!” Sadie called as she ran after the machine. When it got away, she ran back up the drive. That was when she saw Toaff.
She had caught him going into the garden, so he fled up a pole. Perched safely on its top, he waved his tail and chittered down fiercely, to persuade her to be afraid of him, or at least to leave him alone, or maybe to just stop her yarking.
She couldn’t understand what he was saying. “What? What?” she yarked. Then she sat down, and dragged her tail back and forth through the wet grass. “It rained!” she told him.
“I know,” Toaff answered.
“What?” she asked. “Angus yarkyark ribbon. Angus yark get a leg.”
“Did he lose one of his legs?” Toaff asked. This was an amazing piece of news, and an alarming possibility. “I didn’t see a missing leg.”
“What?” Sadie said. “You aren’t a dog,” she told him.
“I know,” said Toaff.
“Or a cat.”
“I’m a squirrel.”
“What?” Sadie yarked. “What are you saying? I’m a dog,” she told him. “I don’t think you’re a mouse? Are you? I think you’re a squirrel.”
Toaff started to whuffle. He couldn’t help it.
“Are you all right?” Sadie asked, and now she stood up on her hind legs, almost as tall as the pole, and her black nose was much too close, and her long teeth, too.
Toaff gathered his legs under him and leaped, through the air to the next pole.
“Look at you!” yarked Sadie. She ran after him, but he was too quick for her. “Play!” she yarked happily. “Play!”
Toaff was glad to do just that. There was a lot of only in Sadie, he decided. It was too bad she was a dog.
Not many days later, Missus also noticed Toaff, who was on top of a pole, waiting for the chance to run to safety. She said something to Sadie, who was busy helping the baby move through the garden dirt by pushing it with her nose. Sadie answered, “Maybe squirrel?” and Missus said something else, to which Sadie said, “Baby safe.” But Missus kept on watching Toaff and he was worried about what that watching meant.
After a while, Sadie came closer to his pole, dragging the baby, who was holding on to her tail with its paws. “Squirrel?” she yarked.
“Yes,” Toaff answered softly, since he wondered if a quieter voice might help her understand. “Yes, squirrel.” He used as few words as possible. “Toaff.”
“What?” Sadie yarked loudly. “What?”
Missus looked up, watching again.
Everything was quiet, just for a few heartbeats, and in that quiet time, it was Sadie who heard the voice first. She turned her head to point her ears toward the stone wall that separated the garden from the woods beyond. Then Toaff heard it, too, and he understood what it was saying.
It was saying his name. “Toaff? Toaff?”
Sadie jerked her tail free and ran yarking back to the end of the garden nearest the wall. Missus came to pick up the baby, but Toaff no longer cared about them. The voice was chukking his name, so it had to be a squirrel, and not just any squirrel: Gray squirrels were the ones who chukked.
Toaff scampered down the pole to run outside the garden, around to that wall. Standing on top of a stone, he listened some more, and sniffed. At first he heard just the wind brushing through pine branches and whispering in the leaves of trees. He smelled only pine trees and dirt. He saw just trunks and pine branches and low bushes. Then he heard faint murmuring sounds, like squirrels speaking in their smallest voices, squirrels who were afraid to be heard or seen. Slowly, carefully, he moved over the stones toward those voices. When he came close enough to understand them, a voice no louder than falling snow said, “I must have been wrong.”
“Yes.” A soft, sad agreement.
“What will we do now?” An unhappy question.
Toaff didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to frighten them. He wondered if he should whisper, too, or maybe he should just reassure them in his normal voice, Don’t worry, it’s safe enough here. He took two more steps and he still couldn’t see them. Where were they?
“Hello?” he called softly.
There was a brief silence, then the first voice answered. “Hello?”
“I can’t see you,” Toaff said.
“We’re hiding,” the voice answered.
“You found a good place to hide in,” Toaff said. What was going on? Normally, at the sound of another squirrel’s friendly voice, a gray squirrel would come popping out.
“I found it!” announced a second voice. “It was me!”
Toaff felt like whuffling, but he didn’t. “That was a good job of finding you did,” he said, trying to sound serious, and he followed the trail of voices a few more steps along the top of the wall.
“I tried,” claimed a third. “I tried hard. I tried as hard as I could, didn’t I, Leaf?”
Leaf was the first voice, and it responded, “You did. We all tried, and Neef was the best finder this time.”
“Or maybe that’s me!” Toaff announced as he jumped down to the ground. He stood right in front of the piled-up stones, but not close enough to block an opening and not until he had looked all around to be sure there wasn’t any danger nearby. Toaff hoped that he would be safe, for a little time at least, out in the open like that.
The furry face of a gray squirrel appeared in an opening and asked, “Toaff?”
Huddled beside her, but still hidden back in the darkness, were two more squirrels, but all Toaff could see of them was four shiny black eyes.
“Yes, hello, are you Leaf?” he asked.
“Hello, yes, I’m Leaf, how did you know?” She answered herself, “Tief said it, didn’t he?” As she spoke, she emerged from the stones, a small gray squirrel whose tail was not nearly as fat with fur as it would be when she was full grown. “Come out, you two. It’s safe,” she said. “I think.”
“It is,” Toaff said as two equally small gray squirrels came hesi
tantly out.
“We’re still little,” the smallest said. Then he told Toaff, “I’m Neef.”
Leaf introduced the other one. “And this is Tief.”
“You really are little,” Toaff realized.
“Too little to be on our own,” Tief agreed. “And I wish we weren’t because I want my mother. I know I’m not supposed to say that anymore, but I do. I really do.” He turned to Leaf. “I’m sorry.”
Leaf explained. “We were moving to a better territory, running through the grass, and I think it took longer than our mother thought it would, because—”
“There was a wind, or it was like a wind, and then she was going up into the air like—” Neef interrupted.
“And she screamed,” Tief added, in a small voice.
“Then she stopped screaming,” Neef said.
“A hawk, I think,” Leaf concluded. “The wings were dark, like the wind at night—and she was gone. So we’re trying to find the better territory by ourselves.”
They were all silent, looking at one another, until finally Tief couldn’t stand it any longer. “Will you take us with you? Please? Toaff? It’s so big out here, and I’m little,” he said, in a complaining-explaining voice. “You have a nest, don’t you?”
“It’s not very large,” Toaff said.
“We don’t mind,” Leaf told him. “We can help make it bigger. If you let us. I can forage, too. We can be quiet.”
Toaff had already made up his mind. These Littles needed time to learn how to take care of themselves. He could show them what he knew, about building nests and dreys and dens, about predators, about places to forage. He knew the safety rules, too, because he had already been outside for weeks before his mother went away. He could help them.
Also, he wanted to take them to his den. It would be crowded, but he’d like to sleep in a den crowded with warm furry bodies, for a change. “Follow me,” he said, and hurried off along the stone wall path back to his fir.
As soon as the Littles were inside, they crowded into Toaff’s small nest and fell asleep, all of them piled up together, without saying a word. It happened in three blinks of an eye and then there Toaff was, looking into his own den from outside, as if he was the stranger and they were the ones who belonged. He whuffled quietly at the surprises any day might bring with it. But he knew it wouldn’t be long before hunger overcame exhaustion, so he searched out a pinecone large enough to provide food for all of them and carried it back to the entrance. There, he sat on a branch and waited for the Littles to wake up.
The Littles were awake just long enough to pick everything edible out of the pinecone and then fall asleep again. But not before Leaf thanked Toaff. “I knew you could help, I knew you would, because we’re so new and little.”
“I’m not that big,” Toaff told her. He hadn’t come out until the winter, after all.
“Not like us,” Leaf said. “Not like us, we’re new-little and you’re old-little and…” She was asleep before she could finish that thought. All the rest of the afternoon, Toaff waited and waited for them to wake up. But they had had a long and difficult journey and they didn’t stir, so eventually, when it grew dark, Toaff crawled onto the top of the pile of squirrels stuffed into his nest, to fall asleep himself.
In the morning the Littles burst into life. Maybe it was because, as usual, the dogs ran up to the nest-house yarking so they were startled awake, and when they tried to move, their legs and tails got all tangled up, which made them whuffle wildly. Maybe it was the good night’s sleep after a long, hard journey. Whatever the reason, the Littles were full of energy and the need to run and chitter. Leaf jumped up onto the branch where Toaff sat watching Angus and Sadie eat, to tell him, “Those are the dogs.”
“I know,” Toaff said.
“The sheep tell them things,” Leaf informed him.
What do you know about sheep? Toaff wanted to ask, but Leaf kept on explaining.
“We can’t understand much of what the dogs say but I know their names, Ang and Say. Our mother told us that. Our mother could understand a lot of what the sheep told the dogs to tell us.”
Toaff would have told her the dogs’ whole names, but Leaf continued to explain.
“Sheep know squirrels can’t understand them.”
Toaff knew from Braff where the sheep were to be found and he wondered if she had seen Braff, and maybe Soaff, too. “Did you come from behind the nest-barn?” he asked.
Leaf swung around to look right at him. Her round black eyes glistened brightly and her tail waved in excitement. “Behind the nest-barn is where we want to go! That’s where the sheep said to go!”
“Then why were you at the garden?” he asked, confused.
“Garden?” Leaf asked, and now she was confused too. But right then was when Tief and Neef came scrambling up to ask, “Is there another pinecone? I’m hungry, aren’t you? Can you find us some food, Toaff?” And since they were all having a big morning hunger, the four squirrels went to forage together. Toaff showed them how seeds could be found in the grass by the stone wall, and cones near the firs, and all kinds of food in the dirt pile. It wasn’t until they had all crowded back into the nest that night that Toaff had a chance to ask his questions.
A squirrel had to be very tired to fall asleep jammed up with three other squirrels in a nest built for one. Neef and Tief could do it right away but Toaff and Leaf were wakeful. So they talked in low voices, in the sleeping darkness of night on the farm, when only the wind was still awake and restless, the wind and those creatures who hunt by night.
Leaf knew she was a guest and wanted to apologize. “I’m sorry that this fir trunk is too narrow for us to chew more room for a bigger den.”
Toaff’s head was jammed up against hard wood but he wanted to be polite. “We’ll find another nest for you tomorrow. There’s sure to be a good place for a den for you in the woods.”
“But we don’t know—” Leaf began, and then she stopped herself. Toaff felt her shift in the darkness. He could almost feel her, staring at the dark shape that was him. He could almost hear her thinking.
Then, as if Toaff hadn’t said anything about the Littles moving out of his nest, Leaf started talking again. “It was the lake that came first, of the whole farm. Did you know that? The sheep made the lake first. Do you know how they made the lake? Do you know what a lake is?”
“It’s a big puddle, isn’t it?”
“It’s water,” she said, again as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’s a whole wide field of water that stretches from one hillside to another and is so big it never disappears, all year long. It ripples when the wind blows over it, and when no wind blows, it lies smooth and still as the sky. If you fall into the lake, you sink and sink and never come to its bottom, and you’re never seen again because the lake takes you. The same way as when a hawk comes out of the sky to take you up and up until you disappear.”
Toaff asked, “Does the lake hunt squirrels?”
Leaf whuffled softly. “No. The lake isn’t like that, the lake is a good thing. That’s why the sheep made it, so there will always be water. They made the lake first and then the little streams. I’ve never seen the lake but others have, and everyone knows why the sheep wanted to make it, and how they made it. And I’ve seen a stream so I know the lake is real, somewhere. Do you want to hear how the sheep made it?”
She wanted to tell him the story, so Toaff didn’t interrupt again.
“At first,” Leaf said, “there was the farm with its fields, and the grasses and trees, and the wild animals in the woods, and that was all. But the sheep knew that animals need water and so do the grasses and trees. So they chose a good place, a wide meadow up in the hills, and they began to eat all the grass there. They ate and they ate. Day after day they ate as much as they could, until that whole wide meadow was bare dirt. Then they began to run on the dirt, back a
nd forth and around, stamping down hard on the ground, until it sank away under their hooves. When it had sunk away so far that no sheep could see how deep it was, they all went back up the hillside and waited.”
Leaf fell silent, as if she was one of those sheep, waiting.
Finally Toaff asked, “Waited for what?”
“Waited until the moon was full. On that night they all gathered together to sing their water song. The sheep knew that when the moon is full, the water underground comes up close to the surface, to catch some of the moon’s silver. So on that full moon night, they sang their song. Bau-bau is all our ears can hear, so we don’t know the song.”
Toaff had heard bau-bauing; he knew that sound.
Leaf continued. “But the oldest things do know that song, the water and the wind and the rocks underground. Bau-bau, sang the sheep, and the water came closer, to hear. Bau-bau, they sang, until the water broke up, up through the dirt and rocks at the bottom of the deep deep meadow. The sheep kept singing, and the water kept rising up to hear their song, until the lake was filled with water, enough for fish to swim in and enough for the little streams to take with them when they ran away down the hillside carrying water to all the creatures they passed on their way, and all the grasses and trees, too.”
Leaf stopped again, and waited again, until Toaff spoke.
“That’s a good story,” he said. “What did the crows have to say about the lake?”
“Crows don’t say things. Just sheep. And dogs, and us.”
“What about humans?” Toaff asked. “Did they want the lake?”
“It was before the sheep brought the humans to the farm, but that’s too long a story for tonight,” Leaf answered. “I’m too tired to tell it now. Tomorrow, Toaff, can you wait until tomorrow?”
If he had to, Toaff could wait, and so he agreed.
The next day, whenever Toaff suggested that maybe the Littles wanted to find themselves a larger den, Leaf explained, “We don’t need another den because the sheep want us to go behind the nest-barn. That’s what the dogs said.”
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