Toaff's Way

by Cynthia Voigt

  That evening, Leaf announced, “Toaff wants to hear how the humans came to the farm. Do you want to hear that story again?”

  “Yes,” Neef said, and Tief said, “Yes, please.” They shifted in the nest, making themselves more comfortable, to listen.

  Toaff’s head was jammed up against the top of the den again. He hadn’t asked about any story and he started to insist, gently and politely, but firmly, that tomorrow the Littles had to go. “I’m sorry—” he began, but Leaf had started talking.

  “The sheep had the lake, for water. They had the trees, for shelter. But sheep need to eat, and with the meadow gone they had just the sparse grasses at the edges of the woods. Each morning the sheep woke up hungrier than the day before, and they wandered around like lost things until the youngest ram had a new idea. It’s the young who have more ideas, even if they don’t know enough to tell the good ones from the bad. Luckily, this was a good one. ‘Humans,’ he said. ‘We need humans to cut down the trees and make pastures for us, and we’ll let them live on the farm as long as they take proper care of us.’

  “What the young ram had not thought of,” Leaf continued, “which others did, was how hard it is to capture a human. But one of the oldest rams had a good idea, because when the old do have ideas, they are often good ones. The old ram said, ‘We’ll go to the road, and when a machine comes along, we’ll take its human.’ ”

  Toaff knew about the road. He told them, “Machines go on the road. Machines are really dangerous.” He was about to announce that this story couldn’t possibly be true, but Leaf interrupted.

  “The sheep knew that,” Leaf said. “But they had to have a human even if everyone knows those machines squish and squash and then just keep going as if they can’t even feel what they’ve done. But one of the mothers—she had a lamb to care for and feed—argued that there was no other good idea to try. ‘A sheep is smart enough to figure out how to stop a machine,’ she said. ‘We just need one human,’ she said. So the sheep found a stream to follow down to the road. While they were traveling, they had to eat whatever they could find in the woods. They ate pine needles and fallen-down dried-up leaves and it was a very hard journey.”

  At that point in her story, Leaf fell silent, and listened. “Sleeping,” she announced to Toaff, “and I think I will too, now that everything is quiet.”

  “But,” he protested, “you didn’t say how they got their human. You never told me what sheep look like.”

  “Oh,” she said in a sleepy voice. “Like dogs. But bigger, and they have thick thick curly hair. Like deer, with their thin thin legs.”

  “I don’t know what a deer looks like,” he protested. “Don’t go to sleep yet.”

  “Like a dog but bigger, but with longer thinner legs and not much of a tail and no hair and…” Leaf slid into the night’s slumbers.

  Toaff knew perfectly well what Leaf was doing. As long as there was a story he wouldn’t get to hear if they moved out of his den, he wasn’t going to make them leave. Toaff knew that and—actually?—he didn’t mind. He was a squirrel and squirrels love stories.

  Also, like any squirrel, Toaff was just as happy to be with others as to be alone. Except for the overcrowded nest at night, he enjoyed having the Littles around—the games, the conversations, the foraging together and sharing what they found to eat. He especially liked the way they listened to him when he told them where food might be found and taught them about keeping safe from the cats. Toaff was the one who knew things. Being the one who knew was a new way of being only, and he liked it.

  So the stories continued, and the Littles stayed on. Toaff heard how, when one machine after another had simply swerved around a sheep that stood right out on the road, the herd determined on a bold and dangerous move. Instead of depending on one sheep, who was usually young and male, to have the courage to face one of those machines, they decided to leave mothers and lambs behind while all the others, ewes and rams, old and young, clustered together on the road. Clustered together they took up so much of the road that the machine couldn’t swerve by, and had to stop, and then, when its human had herded them—which was what he thought he was doing—out of his way, they led him up the drive to where a nest-house waited. Once he had come as far as the nest-house, he stayed on, just as they had planned. He cleared the woods, sometimes to make a pasture for the sheep and sometimes to make a field where he could grow winter food for them. After that, the human ran the farm to serve the sheep. This had all happened long, long ago, so long ago no sheep could remember it for himself.

  When Toaff asked, “What about the dogs?” Leaf knew the story, but he had to wait for the next night to hear it.

  It was hard for humans to understand what sheep wanted, she pointed out. So the sheep asked for dogs, to be their messengers, their translators and special servants. When Toaff asked, “What about squirrels?” she reminded him that the uneaten seeds and nuts buried and forgotten by squirrels became more trees, to provide shelter for the humans who took care of the sheep. When he wondered next about cats, and raccoons and foxes, and raptors, too, the owls and hawks, she whuffled. “You forgot eagles. They’re the strongest of all the birds. Never forget eagles. But didn’t you ever think how crowded with squirrels the woods would be if there were no predators? Squirrels would have babies and those babies would have more babies and all of those squirrels would eat all of the seeds and nuts, and where would the new trees come from? Humans need trees and humans serve the sheep, so the sheep want just a certain number of squirrels. They send predators to take care of the rest.”

  Eventually Toaff heard how the Littles came to be hiding in the garden wall that day. “You can smell fall just coming here,” Leaf said, “but in the mountains it had already arrived, and when the dogs came to find out what the sheep wanted, the sheep told the dogs to announce, Behind the nest-barn!”

  “But I thought you couldn’t understand what the dogs say,” Toaff pointed out.

  “We worked it out,” Leaf told him. “We talked about it and figured it out all together.”

  “I heard nest-barn,” Neef boasted. “Everybody heard it. And so did I!”

  “Squirrels knew nest-barn already,” Tief assured Toaff. “But it took our mother to figure out behind.”

  Leaf explained, “It’s never easy to be sure exactly what the sheep want the dogs to tell us. It’s hard to understand exactly what the dogs are saying, because they yark and sturf so much. But the squirrels have learned a few words. Play and nest-barn are two words the dogs say over and over and we know for sure that we know them.”

  “We know obey, too,” Neef added, “and here.”

  Leaf said, “Some squirrels heard hind and some argued that it was be. They quarreled about that until someone asked, ‘Could it be both?’ But hindbe made no sense. Nest-barn hindbe? Or hindbe nest-barn? Everyone was guessing, and each everyone said he had it right.”

  “It was our mother who really did get it right,” Tief announced proudly. “Even though no one had asked her what she thought, our mother said behind.”

  “Which made sense,” Neef pointed out. “It was our mother who made sense.”

  “So even if it’s not always easy to know what the sheep want us to do,” Leaf concluded, “that time we did.”

  Having realized what the sheep wanted them to do, the squirrels began their journey. Nest-barn had to do with the human, they guessed, so the place to look first was the nest-house. The nest-house, they had heard, was no more than four days’ journey if you found the stream and followed it. But it was hard to find the stream, and there had been no shelter along the way, so one after the other, most of the squirrels were picked off, by foxes and fishers and owls.

  This was the third time he’d heard the word, but before Toaff could ask about fisher, “We hid from the raccoons,” Neef told him. “They never even knew we were there.”

 
“They were talking about the lake, but I don’t think sheep want raccoons near their lake, do you? Raccoons are so dirty and rough, and they eat almost anything, and they try to steal our babies when the mothers aren’t there to protect them. Raccoons are—”

  “We don’t have to worry about raccoons coming here,” Leaf said soothingly, and Toaff did not bother to correct her. He had a different concern.

  “If the sheep wanted you to go behind the nest-barn, why did so many squirrels get hunted down?”

  “I think there were too many of us, many too many, so the others had to die. I think it’s just us little ones who are supposed to be behind the nest-barn, and I think we’re supposed to wait there for the sheep,” Leaf answered him. “I thought about it all and that’s the one thing that makes sense. Because,” she reminded him, “the sheep take care of us. They know we can’t understand them, so they ask the dogs to tell us what they want us to do, and that’s what the dogs said.”

  “What about the humans?” Toaff asked, remembering what the Lucky Ones thought.

  “Humans are nothing to do with squirrels,” Leaf told him. “They’re here to take care of the sheep. The sheep take care of everything else, squirrels, raccoons, dogs, probably even cats, too, if we could know what sheep think.”

  “What about birds?”

  “Hawks and owls? Their job is to hunt us.”

  “I mean crows.”

  She thought for a minute. “I think crows must have been a mistake, don’t you? They don’t help the sheep and they don’t do anything useful either.”

  “What about snowstorms, or windstorms? Or rainstorms when the sky explodes with that sharp light?” If Leaf could just see one little crack in what she was saying, then maybe she would see that the rest didn’t make sense, not really.

  Unless it did make sense and it was Toaff who just couldn’t see it?

  “Is rain the same as rainstorm?” Leaf asked.

  Two days later, her question was answered. A strong wind rose. It blew itself in, in the dark of night, to push against and pull at their fir, pushing against the trunk and pulling at the branches, trying, and trying again, to force the tree down onto its side and rip its roots out of the ground. The wind brought a beating rain that came down so fast and heavy that no squirrel dared to put even his nose out into the stormy day, lest he be washed out of his den, and blown away, and lost.

  All that night, their young fir swayed, back and forth, from side to side. The wind swirled around its trunk and the rain washed down on its needles. All through that dark night and all through the next day, too—a day that stayed as dim as dawn—the wind whistled and the rain lashed and the fir bent easily and swung gently back upright and Toaff didn’t worry.

  However, as the storm pounded the fir hour after hour after hour, Toaff began to think about the big drey, so high up in its maple. Was it built strongly enough to withstand such a storm? Was it securely enough placed on its branches? He remembered how thick its walls were and the way it nestled down into three strong, thick branches. Probably the Lucky Ones were safe, he hoped.

  The four squirrels in Toaff’s small den huddled uncomfortably together. All they could do was talk, about sheep and dogs, raccoons and birds, the lake, the apple trees, the pasture. Toaff told them about his first nest, with Braff and Soaff, Old Criff, his mother, and the others, in the big den in the dead pine tree near the horse chestnut. He made an exciting story out of the winter snowstorm and waking up alone, about Mister and the chain saw and his flight to the apple trees. Until he told it as stories, he didn’t realize how interesting his life so far had been.

  The storm continued, into the next night, and eventually even stories couldn’t keep the Littles from being uneasy and afraid. It was Tief who spoke up, in a small voice, and admitted, “I don’t like it when our nest moves like this.”

  Neef burst out with a question he couldn’t hold in any longer. “Is our tree going to blow over too? Will it hurt?”

  Then Leaf said, “You know, we’re not doing what the sheep told us. Maybe the sheep sent the storm to remind us,” she suggested. “They told us, Behind the nest-barn. That’s what the dogs said.”

  “They did. They did,” agreed Tief and Neef, and for some reason, maybe because Leaf had brought the two ideas so close together, that was when Toaff finally remembered something Braff had told him.

  “Do the sheep go behind the nest-barn in winter?” he asked.

  Nobody could tell him. They hadn’t come outside until summer.

  “Because,” Toaff explained, “when my littermate came back after—before Mister and the chain saw but after the tree blew down—”

  “Don’t talk about that!”

  “Braff told me they had gone where the sheep were. He said the humans fed the sheep.”

  “Of course they do, if there’s no pasture. Didn’t you listen to what I told you? That’s why the sheep have humans here on the farm.” Leaf shifted around until her head was close to Toaff’s. “Do you know the way to the nest-barn?”

  At that, Toaff whuffled so loudly even the wind couldn’t drown it out.

  She drew back as far as she could in that small space. “You shouldn’t laugh. Not when it’s something the sheep told us.”

  Toaff tried to point out, “It was the dogs who told you.”

  “That’s their job. The sheep tell the dogs so the dogs can tell us.”

  “When this storm stops, after we eat, I’ll show you the nest-barn,” Toaff promised.

  “When will it stop?” wailed Neef.

  “Storms stop when they stop and not before,” Toaff told him. “But they do stop. That I’m sure of.”

  “Really sure?” Tief asked.

  “Really sure,” Toaff promised, and of course he was right.

  After a night and a day and another night of wild wind and slashing rain, the storm went on to bother another farm and a sunny morning dawned over the farm. The four squirrels burst out of the small den to breathe in the warm summer air. But the air wasn’t warm. It had been rinsed in coldness before it came out to fill the sky. It was crisp and it tasted fresher than any air Toaff had breathed since early spring. It was also full of busy sounds, machine sounds and human sounds and a faint smell of—was it apples? The dogs yarked excitedly and the chain saw screeched. Crows kaah-kaahed their way across the sky and the cows muuh-muuhed, but these voices sounded quick and hurrying, not slow and lazy. In this cool morning weather, all the voices sounded sharper.

  Toaff guessed that fall had begun and he knew he was right even if he didn’t know how he knew. Fall made him hungry, and full of strength, as if he could leap and run all the way to the front of the nest-house and back around to his fir and no cat could catch him.

  However, all of this noisy activity made the Littles uneasy and unhappy. They ran right back to the den as soon as they had eaten and huddled there until hunger drove them out to forage again. When the farm was just as busy the next morning, Leaf made up their minds.

  “We want to go to behind the nest-barn,” she announced. “Right now. We can forage when we get there. Where is the nest-barn, Toaff? Do you know?”

  “It’s right there. Beyond the garden,” Toaff answered.

  “Isn’t that a nest?”

  “No, it’s the nest-barn,” Toaff said. Then he wondered if he could be sure his word for it was righter than any other, and added, “I think.”

  “I see it,” Leaf said, but she had something else to wonder about. “I also see two cats and I see one of those machines that carry humans.” She meant to say that she saw danger without using that exact word in front of Neef and Tief. “But you know a safe path,” she told Toaff.

  “I’m not going with you,” he told her. He was thinking of apples, remembering the two small trees.

  “You have to!” they all cried, all of their six blac
k eyes bright with alarm. “Why would you stay here when the dog told us about you so you know the sheep want you to come with us?”

  “What dog told you about me?”

  “Say did. When we were hiding,” Neef said.

  “Say told us your name so we could call you. Don’t you remember?” asked Tief.

  “Can we go now?” Leaf asked him. “Right away? Because if we don’t, the sheep might send another storm.”

  “We better go,” the others echoed. “We’re not supposed to stay here.”

  “Toaff?” Leaf asked, and said, without saying the words, You’re the one who knows the way so you have to, please.

  Toaff was getting a little tired of being the one who knew things, and also he had never actually been anywhere close to the nest-barn, so he didn’t know any way. He was about to say his goodbyes to the Littles when the dogs came yarking out of the nest-house, with Mister right behind them. “Come on, Sadie, the sheep yarkyark!” Angus said, and Sadie answered, “Herd sheep! Run! Crouch!” Then Mister said something short and sharp and they all jumped up into one of the machines and it went along the drive, but not toward the road. It went away from the nest-house and nest-barn in the other direction.

  “Did you hear? Say said sheep!” Leaf cried.

  “So did Ang!” Neef cried. “We have to go!”

  “We’re already late!” Tief cried.

  “Toaff?” Leaf asked again, with even more please in her voice.

  “You go,” Toaff said. “I’m staying,” and before they could argue, or begin another story, he scrambled down the trunk of the fir. He ran along the stone wall, heading for the garbage-nest and the bushes and eventually the apple trees. But as soon as he came to the drive, he had to stop. And stare.

  Toaff stared at the disaster that had happened beside the big white nest-house. There was a pile of cut-up oak branches beside the garbage-nest and a confusion of long maple and oak branches lying on the grass. It looked as if the storm had grabbed those three tall trees and dug its nails in, and jerked. Jerked hard. Jerked hard, again and again. Then, when it had ripped off a branch, it lost interest and dropped the broken thing onto the grass before moving on to its next victim. The storm was like a cat hunting not for hunger but for its own amusement.