by Jane Yolen
Text copyright © 2014 by Jane Yolen
Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Chris Monroe
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means––electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise––without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yolen, Jane.
Trash Mountain / by Jane Yolen.
pages cm
Summary: When the gray squirrels kill his parents, a young red squirrel vows revenge, finding unlikely allies in the rats and gulls of Trash Mountain.
ISBN 978–1–4677–1234–7 (trade hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4677-7170-2 (EB pdf)
[1. Red squirrels—Fiction. 2. Gray squirrel—Fiction. 3. Squirrels—Fiction. 4. Animals—Fiction. 5. Introduced animals—Fiction. 6. Survival—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.Y78Ts 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013030727
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 — BP —12/31/14
eISBN: 978-1-46777-170-2 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-46777-683-7 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-46777-684-4 (mobi)
For Elizabeth Harding and Heidi Stemple,
who kept the faith. And for my friends
in Scotland who love red squirrels:
Susan Gassaway, Janie Douglas,
and Pamela Robertson. —J.Y.
For all the red squirrels out there.
I’m rooting for you. —C.M.
This you should know:
Gray Squirrels are larger, faster, and more aggressive than Reds. They outeat the Reds and outbreed them. They are resistant to the Squirrel pox that they alone carry. All this scientists can tell us. But they don’t know if Grays are smarter than Reds. At least they don’t know yet. But some of us have our suspicions.
Nutley lived with Mummy and Father in a dark fir tree way in the back part of Farmer Temple’s garden. The fir was so old that it had bare branches halfway up its trunk. And halfway farther up, hidden behind the pine needles and pinecones, was a round hole. The hole was small but comfortable, with a soft bed of pine, feathers, and fur, and decorated with flowers and leaves of the season. Mummy made sure of that. When each season had gone by, she would mat down and shred the old stuff. Then out she would go to gather the new. It insulated the hole and kept the temperature perfect all year-round. Even in the grayest, coldest part of winter, the hole was warm. Even in the brightest, hottest part of the summer, the hole was cool. And this was how it should be, for after all, the hole was home.
Mummy and Father had never tried to live in the hazelnut trees on the sunnier side of the farmhouse, next to the lazy stream that ran along the front of the farmhouse. The stream ran over twenty-one stones before tailing off under a small stone bridge. In fact, Mummy and Father never even went near that small stand of trees. And yet, it seemed to Nutley that it made much more sense to live there, close to their favorite food—hazelnuts—and farther from fears of Fox and Owl, who preferred hanging about the farmyard, where mice and rabbits were easy pickings.
But whenever Nutley asked why—and he asked often—Mummy shook her head and Father explained: “To do so is to Court Disaster.”
“Why Court? Why Disaster?” asked Nutley long before he had a chance to find out for himself.
Father didn’t answer. Instead, he scratched at a pinecone in search of loose nuts, as if the pinecone was much more interesting than any question Nutley might pose.
“Never mind, dear, never mind,” Mummy said. Then she recited,
Beware Red Fox and Owl Light,
Beware blood jaws and Owl Flight
before putting wet paws to Nutley’s ear tufts, which both tickled and soothed. It also made him deaf for the moment, which successfully stopped any further conversation.
***
When he’d been younger and asking those sorts of questions frequently, Nutley always spoke while hugging his acorn doll or his crinkly grass pillow or his old bean rattle or some combination of the three. They lent him comfort in discomforting moments.
At those moments, Mummy and Father would smile at him and pet him and call him sweetling and sunshine, dearling and son. And sometimes they even answered his questions, though not in any way he really understood.
He was a bit spoiled, of course. He’d been the smallest of the litter, but his brothers and sisters had died of the pox one right after another. “In two weeks,” Mummy said when feeling especially sad. So now he got all of his parents’ attention. That was fine last year, when he’d been little and not able to bounce around and climb, not able to run in the sun or make it out to the bendy part of the smallest tree branches.
Now he was much too old for toys. The doll and the rattle and the pillow lay discarded under his bedding in the hole. Discarded—but not entirely forgotten. Sometimes in his sleep, he would turn over and one of them would lump up under him and then—only half awake—he felt around for it. Hours later, when he woke fully, holding the doll or the pillow or the rattle, he would hastily rebury it under the bedding before anyone could see. He didn’t want to appear childish. Not even to Mummy and Father.
Especially to Mummy and Father.
***
But now Nutley was old enough to know the answers. The full and true and real answers. He knew them but wanted to understand them as well. After all, he was growing, no longer a pup but a yearling. His tail and ear tufts had turned redder and occasionally fluffed properly. And real questions, longer questions, difficult questions seem to fluff into his head all the time.
“Why can’t I run and play over in the sunny end of the garden?” he’d asked Mummy just the other day. “Why can’t we pick up hazelnuts for winter instead of just the same old pine nuts?” he asked Father.
Actually, he thought he understood the answers already, but he wasn’t absolutely certain. If only he could hear a true, full, real explanation from a grown-up. When a grown-up spoke about such things at length, those things usually became clear.
He chased his tail and fluffed his ears and waited to hear what they had to say.
But Mummy and Father only talked to him in short, sharp sentences, as if they were annoyed with him or thought him slow to understand. Or—and this was the most frightening thing of all—as if they didn’t love him quite as much anymore. They certainly had stopped calling him sweetling and sunshine, though Father still called him son—but only when he was angry.
Nutley looked steadily at them both, his eyes dark and shiny as wet river pebbles. Father always said that one should look directly at the Squirrel addressed. And so Nutley did.
“After all,” Nutley continued, “I think hazelnuts are yummier than pine nuts.” He realized after saying the last bit that it was a mistake. He should have just stuck with questions. And, after all, he had only had a hazelnut once. By accident. When Mummy had found it amidst the leaves she’d gathered. So maybe that wasn’t a big enough sample. Father always cautioned that one ought not to make wild guesses.
“Because of the Grays,” Mummy said, her voice and tail tense. “They are not a sharing race.” Then her tail twitched. Go away, go away, it semaphored.
Father nodded,
adding, “An introduced race at that.” His face was pinched as if he’d eaten something sour—a nut that had gotten frostbit or a berry gone bad.
Introduced, thought Nutley, turning it over in his head the way he turned over nuts in his paws before biting into the meat. Introduced. He looked up brightly, speaking directly to Father. “I could be introduced to the Grays. Maybe they would like me.” But he knew the minute he said it aloud this was not what Father meant at all.
Father dropped the pinecone he was holding and stared at Nutley for a long moment without saying a word. Not even, son. Then he turned back to work extracting the pine nut.
“Never mind, never mind,” Mummy told Nutley quickly. “You would not like the Grays.” Her tail was now kinked and trembling over her head.
Nutley wasn’t convinced. The Grays seemed to have all the fun. And they shared with one another all the time. He’d watched them for hours. They played Catch-as-Can and Pass the Bean and Hide the Bounty and even Raid the Bird Feeders. And best of all, they played Nut Keep Away, flinging a nut across a wide circle of Squirrels. Sometimes, when one Gray buried an acorn, another unburied it.
What can be more sharing than that? Nutley mused. Or more fun? Since his parents didn’t seem to understand that, he wondered if they understood anything at all.
***
Day after day, as soft, moist spring turned to sultry, dry summer and wildflowers burst spontaneously into color in the green fields, Nutley watched the Grays from afar. Often he longed to join them, his tail waving like a flag. Occasionally he would lift a paw to them, but either they never noticed, or they were ignoring him.
Once one of the smallest of the Grays—Nutley heard a mother call him Groundling—looked furtively over his shoulder in Nutley’s direction and raised a tentative paw in return. He seemed to smile. Before Nutley could call out or smile back or do anything at all, Groundling had been roundly cuffed about the ears by his mother for his effort. He ran off wailing into the tall grass. Nutley could see the flag of his gray tail kinking and unkinking by a stand of brambles, signaling his distress. When he finally composed himself, Groundling left the safety of the brambles, looking neither right nor left but especially not looking over to the fir where Nutley watched. He never made eye contact with Nutley again.
“Why?” Nutley asked over and over, his questions growing as short as his parents’ answers. “Why?”
But Mummy and Father had grown rather tired of answering and soon enough they stopped altogether, simply shrugging or saying, “Figure it out yourself, Nutley.”
And he tried. Truly he tried.
He made lists in his head of everything he observed. One of the lists went like this:
Grays eat nuts.
Grays bury other nuts.
Grays look at the sky and say, “Tsk! Tsk! I think it might snow.” (Though it was still summer and it rarely ever snowed before the winter skies had gone grayer than the Grays’ own backs, so surely they must have known.)
The list went on.
Grays unbury nuts.
Grays eat nuts.
Grays throw acorns against the thickest trees.
He played out little scenes in his imagination where he rescued Groundling. One time it was from a large Cat with so many teeth that even in his make-believe, he didn’t dare get close enough to count them. Another scene had him the only one who noticed a Fox approaching through the tall grass and Nutley’s frantic chittering saved Groundling, who was eating fallen seeds in Farmer Temple’s sunflower bed, all oblivious to Danger. A third—his favorite—was where he leaped up and pulled a screaming Groundling from the clutches of a silent predatory Owl. And after each one of these make-believe scenes, the Reds and Grays became fast friends and Nutley with his parents moved into the hazelnut copse where they lived alongside the Grays, happily ever after.
Nutley loved telling himself these little stories and could bring them up at any time in his mind, day or night, until they almost became memories. Still, he knew deep down that he had never been so heroic. He had never rescued anyone. The truth was, he was only a Red Squirrel and a small one at that.
***
As summer dragged on and many of the brightest flowers dropped, so did Nutley’s ear tufts and tail. Or rather they drooped, which, he thought, was almost the same thing. There was nothing he could think of to explain why Grays and Reds could not be friends. At least nothing that made any sense. So he determined to simply hold out the Paw of Friendship to Groundling and his family and see what would happen. Though he guessed, in his heart of hearts, that nothing would happen at all.
And there he was terribly, horribly wrong.
This you should know:
An introduced species—also known as an alien or a naturalized or exotic species—is an animal or a plant not native to a place. It has been brought, either deliberately or accidentally, to a new location, often by humans but sometimes by natural means like wind or flood or simple expansion. Sometimes these introduced species damage their new ecosystem. Sometimes they spread disease or disaster. Father was right to fear the Grays.
It took Nutley a couple of days to get his courage up. Out by the Rosebay Willow-herb, he practiced what he would say. What he would say changed from day to day. It even changed hour to hour.
At first he thought it best to start with this: “Hello. My name is Nutley, and I am a Red Squirrel.” But then it occurred to him that they could easily see he was a Red, and that perhaps it was best not to point out differences but rather to remind them how they were all the same.
We are all Squirrels, he thought. Not Foxes on the prowl or Owls on the wing. That should count for a lot.
He practiced what he would say, beginning with, “Hi, brother Squirrels.” But of course, some of them might be sisters, and he didn’t want to offend anyone. So he changed the opening of his greeting to this: “My fellow Squirrels,” which sounded rather too much like Father.
He thought about “Sweetlings,” but that was too much like mother and just horribly inappropriate.
“Friends …” though the Grays weren’t that. Yet.
He even thought about saying, “Hi, buddy!” And winking. But doing so made him shudder. And if he shuddered, he hated to think what it would do to the Grays.
Eventually, after a hundred more tries, he came up with, “Hello, I’m Nutley. And you are … ?”
He nodded to himself, standing up tall on his back legs and addressing a stately purple spear of Rosebay Willow-herb that was already magnificently in flower. Sticking out his right paw, he said it again. “Hello, I’m Nutley. And you are …”
Someone pounced on him from behind, with a victorious tchirring sound, pushing Nutley down on all fours.
“Wait!” he cried, “I’m extending the Paw of Friendship.”
There was a loud rush of laughter all around.
“Grays friends with Reds?” a voice called out. “Don’t be stupid.”
Another voice, dark and angry, added, “Or any more stupid than you already are, talking to the flowers.”
Then a third voice, high-pitched, possibly female, cried, “Push him this way, Groundling!” and Nutley was flung sharply to the right.
Thinking this was the start of some sort of game like Catch-as-Can, only rougher, Nutley rolled onto his shoulder gracefully—well, pretty gracefully for someone caught unawares. He was about to jump up and turn around to tag Groundling, when someone else grabbed his tail and gave it a vicious yank.
“Hey,” Nutley cried, “Not fair.”
“Hey!” they all mimicked. “Not fair!” their voices sour and whiny.
Nutley didn’t think he’d sounded quite like that. He was about to say so, when they all piled on top, knocking the breath out of him. And when he could breathe again, he realized he’d been hoisted up over their heads. They were standing at the top edge of Long Hill.
Nutley looked out over the drop. His stomach took a dive. The drop was, as the name of the hill promised, a long way down.
“No!” he cried. “Stop!” But that only excited the Grays even more.
Nutley guessed what would be coming next and curled up in a little ball, his tail over his back, neck, and head.
“Altogether now,” the Grays chanted, “Sling him! Fling him!” and then they threw him down over the edge of Long Hill.
Long Hill was not only long; it was steep. Steep enough so that in the winter, the Grays like to take leaves and slide down the hill on them imitating Farmer Temple’s grandchildren. Cautious Nutley had never dared do such a thing. Last winter he’d been too small, of course. But he’d watched the Grays gliding down, laughing and calling out to one another, seeming to have a wonderful time.
But gliding down on leaf sleds and rolling end over end after landing from a very great height were two different things. Especially since the Grays ran alongside Nutley, beating him with thorny sticks as he went rumbling and tumbling along. The thorns hurt, and so did the burrs that clung to his fur as he rolled head-over-tail-over-head down the hill.
He landed with a thump against a stump of a big old chestnut tree that Farmer Temple had cut down the summer before. It bruised his back and left bits of bark in the soft places, but mostly what hurt was his pride.
As Nutley lay there, the Grays all clapped their paws together and someone cried out, “Cheers for Groundling!”
He heard footsteps as someone came up close to him.
“Is he done for?” came a shout.
The Gray who’d come near to him called back, “Probably.” It was Groundling. He recognized the voice.
Nutley held his breath and tried to act dead. He didn’t know what he would do if Groundling poked at him or tried to turn him over. Maybe jump up and run. Only where could he run to?
He waited and waited, holding his breath as long as he could, but there was no rustle of leaves, no sound of footsteps coming closer.
Nutley thought that Groundling must have gotten tired of looking at a dead Squirrel. Or maybe he just took pity on Nutley. Whichever it was, Nutley was not to know, but finally, he heard footsteps running away from him and Groundling’s voice now far away, calling to his friends. And then shouting and laughing, the Grays raced away to play Catch-as-Can all the way back up the hill.