Lexi's Tale

by Johanna Hurwitz

  For Andrea Spooner,

  who knows how to improve a tale

  per excellence

  –J.H.

  Text © 2001 Johanna Hurwitz

  Illustrations © 2001 Patience Brewster

  All rights reserved.

  The artwork for this book was prepared by using pencil.

  The text for this book was set in 16-point Centaur MT.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 978-1-5871-7160-4 (pb)

  ISBN 978-1-4521-3795-7 (epub, mobi)

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.chroniclekids.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Breakfast in the Park 1

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rehearsal Time 13

  CHAPTER THREE

  PeeWee in Trouble 27

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Stranger’s Breakfast 35

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Old Wallet 49

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ruckus in the Park 60

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I Go for a Ride 71

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Man Named Stefan 80

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Newspaper Article 86

  CHAPTER TEN

  Squirrel Circus 96

  CHAPTER ONE

  Breakfast in the Park

  What’s better than being a squirrel: running, leaping, soaring, and flying through the air? Being a squirrel means eating delicious seeds and nuts, fruits and flowers, mushrooms and plant buds, and all sorts of leftovers from humans. Being a squirrel means wearing a warm and handsome coat of fur and waving a magnificent tail. What’s better than being a squirrel? Nothing!

  My name is Lexington, but those who know me best save time by calling me Lexi. Lexington is also the name of a big street in New York City where I live. Most of my squirrel relatives are named after streets too. Perhaps that’s why I and all my family are so street-smart. There’s my brother Madison and my cousins Amsterdam and Columbus, for example. But just as most city streets are named by numbers, so most of my relatives are called by those numbers too. I have sisters named Sixty-one, Sixty-two, and Sixty-three, to mention just a few.

  From my home, in a hole high in a maple tree in Central Park, I can see just about everything. I watch the birds flying about and I check out the morning as the park begins to fill with human visitors. At dawn today, I looked out and saw a lone man with a dark beard walking back and forth, back and forth, on a nearby path. He wasn’t wearing running clothes or running shoes, like most early-morning visitors to the park. He had a cap on his head, but it wasn’t a baseball cap. On his feet, instead of sneakers, he wore a pair of leather sandals with socks. I’ve noticed that when people wear sandals, they generally let their bare toes stick out. And, the man seemed to be talking to himself. Silly, I thought.

  “Lexi,” a voice called to me. “How many squirrels are in this park?”

  I looked down from my perch. Below me stood a fat, tailless creature. It was PeeWee, my guinea pig friend. Many weeks ago, at the time of the full flower moon, he was abandoned in the park by his former owner.

  “Who can count? And who cares?” I raced down the tree and landed on the ground next to PeeWee.

  “Everywhere I look, I see squirrels.” PeeWee said. “There must be hundreds of squirrels around here.”

  “I know that years ago a scientist, with nothing better to do with his time, came and spent many weeks trying to count,” I said. “My old uncle Ninety-nine heard the fellow say that there were more than thirteen thousand eight hundred squirrels here in the park. My uncle laughs when he talks about it because he knows there are loads more squirrels than that.”

  What my guinea pig friend didn’t know was that back when he first arrived in the park, Uncle Ninety-nine warned me to keep away from him.

  “Squirrels don’t need other animals,” he had reminded me. “That fat funny fellow won’t be any use to you. In fact, he might get you into trouble.”

  “He’s interesting,” I had told my uncle. “He may not be able to climb to the top of a tree, but he’s seen other parts of the world. He’s lived in a pet shop and inside a human home.”

  “If you don’t watch out, you’ll find yourself in one of the those places too,” old Uncle Ninety-nine had warned me as he dug in the ground. Luckily he had found a large nut and become so busy eating it that he had forgotten what he was saying. My uncle is enormous. All squirrels love food and we eat our own body weight each week, but Uncle Ninety-nine seems to eat enough for two squirrels. As a result, he’s almost as big as some of the dogs that come walking in our park.

  “It must be great fun to have such a huge family,” PeeWee said to me, as he has more than once, referring to the large number of squirrels and not the large size of my uncle.

  “Squirrels don’t care very much about family,” I told him. “We don’t mate for life like many other animals do. Father squirrels don’t stick around to help raise their children. And babies become independent at a very young age. We may play together and chase one another, but a squirrel looks after himself.” I gave myself a good scratch as I thought about it some more. “No,” I added, “squirrels never go out on a limb for anyone else.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” said PeeWee sadly. “I wish there were at least one other guinea pig in the park.”

  Poor PeeWee. I hadn’t given the matter much thought before, but now I realized that it must be lonely to be the only representative of your species in all the 843 acres that make up Central Park. Even the animals over in the zoo are paired together. I tried to distract him.

  “Cheer up,” I said. “If you were back inside that old cage you used to live in, you wouldn’t have another guinea pig or even a squirrel like me to keep you company.”

  “You’re right,” PeeWee quickly agreed. “What would I have done without you?”

  I didn’t answer. The truth is, without me, he never would have survived in the park from day one. PeeWee would have starved or been caught by a dog or come to some other dreadful fate. He arrived in the park with no survival skills at all. He didn’t know how to climb a tree. He’d never dug for food or hidden from danger before. He still can’t climb trees, but at least he’s learned the other things that he needs to live in the outside world. And PeeWee did come to the park with one very special talent: He knows how to read. That’s right, read! He’s the only animal I’ve ever heard of who can do that. And so many times, when other squirrels are sleeping in their nests or chewing on a pawful of seeds, I sit in his little hole and listen to the stories that he reads aloud from the books and papers that have been left in the park by careless humans.

  “We’re living in paradise,” I told PeeWee. “Don’t forget it.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed with me again. “This park has just about everything, even if it doesn’t have other guinea pigs. The food here is a hundred times better than my old cage food. I can’t believe that I was once satisfied eating little dry pellets.”

  “Speaking of food,” I said, “I haven’t eaten my morning meal yet. Have you?”

  “No,” PeeWee said.

  “Then let’s not waste our time talking when we can be chewing,” I told him. “Remember what my mother always said: Early to rise, early to dig, makes a squirrel happy, healthy, and big.”

  “Guinea pigs too,” said PeeWee, pulling a perfect apple out of a pile of leaves where some foolish human must have thrown it. There were no apple trees nearby, and besides, it was far too early in the seasons for the park’s apple trees to be growing fruit.

  “Come and have a bite or two,” PeeWee called to
me.

  What a friend! PeeWee is always quick to share whatever he’s eating. Squirrels never share. All squirrels seem to fear that the nut they’re eating is the last they’ll ever see. Our only sharing is by chance. We all bury extra nuts and seeds, and when we relocate them, we rarely know if they are actually the ones that we hid or if they were buried by a relative instead. It seems to balance out, however. There’s always something good to eat hidden beneath the soil.

  I heard the rustle of footsteps on the ground nearby and looked up from the apple PeeWee and I were sharing. Coming toward us was the bearded man I’d noticed earlier. “Hide,” I whispered to PeeWee. “There’s someone coming. You mustn’t be seen.”

  At once PeeWee scooted under a nearby bush. It wouldn’t do for a human to see a guinea pig here in the park. But no one seems to notice us squirrels. There is a definite advantage to being part of such a large population. I climbed part-way up the maple tree and watched.

  The man walked past. He wasn’t talking now, but his head was down and he seemed to be looking for something. To my amazement, he reached down and picked up the apple that PeeWee had dropped. He brushed off some dirt and took out a small pocket knife. He trimmed the chewed section of the fruit away and then he took a large bite.

  The man walked away munching on my and PeeWee’s meal. I shouted angrily at him in my squirrel tongue, but of course he couldn’t understand. What did he think he was doing? How awful humans can be, I thought as I began digging for something to take the place of our missing apple. How dare that man steal our breakfast!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rehearsal Time

  Squirrels may be very independent creatures, keeping to themselves most of the time, but there is one big exception: Once a year we squirrels hold a huge gathering in the park. It’s not only my brothers and sisters living nearby who attend; cousins and relatives all journey from the far edges of the park to the affair. They travel from other parks in the city too. On this night we hold our famous Squirrel Circus so we can all show off our talents at jumping, climbing, balancing, and running. The big event was going to take place just six nights from now.

  “How do you know exactly when the circus will be?” PeeWee asked me. He was very curious about it and eager to watch our acrobatics. He reminded me of myself when I was a newborn squirrel, looking forward to my first Squirrel Circus.

  “It takes place on the night of the full strawberry moon, even if it rains and the moon can’t be seen. We’ll gather when the clock strikes ten,” I added. I was referring to the hour on the mechanical clock that is a famous park landmark, not my young cousin Ten.

  “It’s strange to be ruled by human time,” PeeWee commented.

  He was right about that. Every other day squirrels rise and sleep by the angle of the sun. The weather affects our actions too. But on the day for the Squirrel Circus, we rely on the mechanical clock because its chimes can be heard from a great distance and it will not be silenced by a cloud.

  There were two things I had to do before the night of the Squirrel Circus. I had to rehearse my own special act, and equally important, I had to deliver the foods that I was contributing to the feast that would follow the gymnastics.

  For the past couple of days more squirrels than usual had been rushing about carrying nuts or seeds in their mouths. The food was being stored up for the banquet in three centrally located tree holes. I wondered how so many squirrels could be in one area of the park without any humans noticing.

  Then PeeWee reminded me that I had once told him that all humans looked more or less alike to me. He’d said, “Did you ever think that humans may feel that way about squirrels?” PeeWee was right. The people who were nearby would never know if they’d seen three squirrels or thirty.

  Up in my tree hole I had put a half-full box of Cracker Jack that some child had left on a park bench. I don’t know which was harder: resisting the temptation to eat the candied popcorn myself, or dragging the box to my hole. Now I reversed my steps and brought the box to the storage sites where the food had been accumulating. Uncle Ninety-nine always put himself in charge of watching over the food supplies. I know I’m not the only squirrel who suspects that he samples the goodies before the circus. I even think he hides some of it away for himself.

  After I added to the food stored in the tree holes, it was time for me to rehearse my tricks. I raced up my maple tree and jumped across to a neighboring one. The average squirrel can leap between trees that are eight feet apart. But I’m not your average squirrel. I’d been working on my leaps and was now confident that I could perform a ten-foot jump. I looked down from my high perch. Below me I saw PeeWee, half-hidden beneath some leaves that he used for camouflage during the day. I made clucking sounds with my mouth to call him.

  Then I turned my head, and to my disgust I recognized the man who had stolen our breakfast apple. He was standing just a few feet away from PeeWee. I said that usually I can’t tell one human from another, but after the bad trick he’d pulled on PeeWee and me, I wasn’t going to forget this man so fast. What was he doing here? Was he watching for something else to take from us?

  I shook my head to get rid of my angry thoughts. When you perform a trick like I was about to do, you need to concentrate on just one thing. I ran around the trunk of my tree to prepare myself. Speed is important when you make a leap. It gives you momentum, and to jump ten feet, one needs a lot of that. “Here I go,” I shouted down to PeeWee as I flung my body through the air.

  What happened next had never happened before. Instead of feeling a rush of air through the hairs of my fur, followed by the solid thud of my feet landing on the tree branch where I had aimed my body, my feet clawed only air. I didn’t feel a branch. For a moment my feet pedaled the air and then I felt myself falling down. My tail acted like a parachute, and a moment later I landed with a hard thump on the ground below. I was stunned. I was certain that I could do that jump.

  I didn’t move. I lay in the grass trying to catch my breath.

  “Lexi! Are you all right? Are you alive?” a worried voice shouted out to me. At the same time I noticed the apple thief rushing toward me. There was no way I was going to let him get his hands on me.

  My animal instinct returned before the movement in my legs did. “PeeWee,” I called as the man came closer, “get back under those leaves.”

  I stood shakily and ran toward the trunk of the nearest tree and climbed to the first branch.

  PeeWee returned to his screen of leaves, but he was still calling to me. “Lexi, what happened? I never saw you fall before.”

  “Stop worrying,” I called back to him. There was an unusual tingling sensation in my limbs, but I knew that nothing was broken. I wouldn’t have been able to climb this far if there was a break. “You’ve heard that a cat has nine lives, haven’t you? Well, squirrels have double that—eighteen. So now I guess I only have seventeen lives left.”

  “Eighteen,” said PeeWee, his voice full of awe. “I never knew that.”

  I moved up to a higher branch as I saw the apple thief coming toward the tree. Worse than the fright and pain of my fall was realizing that this man had seen my failure—and he had seen PeeWee too. Well, I’d show him, I thought. If he wants to keep watching, he’ll see what I can really do—and it might help distract him from the knowledge that there was a guinea pig on the loose in the park.

  He held out his hands as if to take hold of me, but I managed to scramble higher out of his reach. At the top of the tree I ran about, circling the trunk a couple of times. The tingling was fading. My limbs felt fine now.

  “Lexi, don’t jump. Rest a bit more,” PeeWee’s anxious voice floated up to me. But I paid no attention to my earthbound friend. I was going to jump, and jump I did. And this time I made it.

  “Bravo!” I heard a voice shouting.

  I looked down and there was the bearded apple thief wearing his funny hat and clapping his hands together as he looked up at me.

  I didn’t need his pr
aise. Squirrels have existed for more than 35 million years, and we’ve done it without human praise or assistance. It was all my relatives I wanted to impress, not this man with the funny hat.

  I couldn’t wait until the night of our circus. And I didn’t need this man hanging around while I was practicing. Why didn’t he just go off about his own business like all the other people in the park?

  The stranger stood below me looking up for a while. Then he bent down and began to look around on the ground. I knew he was trying to find PeeWee. Luckily my friend had hidden himself well, so the man finally gave up and walked off. Relieved, I climbed into my tree hole for a much-needed nap. I could still run and leap, but my joints were a bit stiff from that big fall I’d taken.

  A squirrel’s day is divided between eating and sleeping. Most of our exercise occurs when we’re in pursuit of one or the other of these activities. The running and jumping that we do happens while we’re searching for our next meal or looking for a comfortable place to take a little snooze. But of course my favorite sleeping place is my own home.

  I have a cozy hole in a healthy, solid tree. I’ve only lived here for a few weeks since my former tree was cut down to make way for a new children’s play area. I was very upset when I heard from PeeWee that my tree home was going to be destroyed. But as my mother always said, Even a bad tree can grow a good nut. For a while, I thought she was talking about nuts. Now that I’m older I know what she really meant—that good things can come out of bad. I would never have gone looking for this wonderful new hole if my old tree was still standing.

  Unlike my old hole, my new home is without leaks and drafts. And I’ve lined it well with leaves and put all my old treasures inside too. It’s impossible to run around a park this large, used by so many careless human beings, and not to quickly begin a collection of lost objects that may become useful. I used to own a couple of books, but once I learned that PeeWee could actually read them, I gave them to him. But there are many other fine items inside my hole: two unmatched mittens, a leather glove, a very soft woolen scarf, a rubber ball, an old wallet, and many other small things that may come in handy in the future.