Toaff's Way Read online

  ALSO BY CYNTHIA VOIGT

  Young Fredle

  Angus and Sadie

  Teddy & Co.

  Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things

  Mister Max: The Book of Secrets

  Mister Max: The Book of Kings

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Cynthia Voigt

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by Sydney Hanson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

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

  ISBN 9781524765361 (trade) — ISBN 9781524765378 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524765385

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Cynthia Voigt

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Winter

  Chapter 1: Toaff in Trouble

  Chapter 2: The Squirrels Explain Things

  Chapter 3: In the Den, in a Winter Storm

  Chapter 4: Everything Changes

  Chapter 5: A Fox on the Hunt

  Chapter 6: Braff Claims the Stores

  Chapter 7: Ice! Dogs!

  Chapter 8: Toaff Crosses the Drive Again

  Chapter 9: Introducing Nilf

  Chapter 10: A Guest Who Wants to Leave

  Chapter 11: Leaping Lessons

  Chapter 12: Toaff the Defender

  Spring

  Chapter 13: Braff’s Farewell

  Chapter 14: Everything Changes, Again

  Chapter 15: Apple Trees

  Chapter 16: Early Spring

  Chapter 17: Spring Surprises

  Chapter 18: Crows and Cats

  Chapter 19: Introducing the Lucky Ones

  Chapter 20: Toaff Makes a Choice

  Chapter 21: How Tzaaf Got His Scar

  Chapter 22: Two More Stories, at Least One of Them True

  Chapter 23: The Lucky Ones Explain Everything

  Summer

  Chapter 24: Toaff Breaks the Rule

  Chapter 25: In Trouble, Again

  Chapter 26: Finding a New Home

  Chapter 27: A New Den in a New Place

  Chapter 28: A New Kind of Day

  Chapter 29: Raccoons! in the Garden!

  Chapter 30: Introducing Sadie

  Chapter 31: Introducing the Littles

  Chapter 32: Dog Tales and Sheep Stories

  Chapter 33: Guests Who Will Not Go Away

  Chapter 34: Leaf Explains Everything

  Chapter 35: In the Den, in a Summer Storm

  Fall

  Chapter 36: Toaff Changes His Mind

  Chapter 37: Behind the Nest-Barn

  Chapter 38: Introducing the Mice

  Chapter 39: Toaff Changes His Mind, Again

  Chapter 40: An Unknown Enemy! an Unexpected Ally!

  Chapter 41: Nilf to the Rescue

  Chapter 42: Nilf Explains Everything

  Chapter 43: A New Den in an Old Place

  Chapter 44: Toaff Takes a Look Around

  Chapter 45: First Sadie, Then Angus, Then the Humans

  Winter Again

  Chapter 46: An Unexpected Guest

  Chapter 47: Can a Tree Grow Lights?

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  FOR THE ONE AND ONLY TOPHER

  What if I—?

  He leaped. Off the horse chestnut branch and out, into empty air. Gray clouds hung over him, white snow shone below, and it was…He thought his chest would burst with it.

  Then he landed on a maple branch that sank gently under him. His bushy tail gave him balance. His sharp nails gripped and he ran toward the trunk, where he sat up on his haunches and whuffled. He hadn’t known he could do that. Nobody had told him. The pride of it, and the surprise…And there was a climb to come, climb up or climb down, whichever he wanted….Sometimes everything was so wonderful that all you could do was whuffle.

  A crow burst out from the top of the maple. The bird entered the sky on widespread wings, screeching, kaah-kaah. Talking to me? Toaff wondered. But what would a crow say to a squirrel? Maybe Good leap! Or Get back where you belong! Or could it be saying Follow me! as it floated over the pasture toward the woods beyond? Toaff had asked his mother what the crows were saying and she had told him, “They’re warning us.”

  “Why?” he had wondered, and she had said, “Crows take care of gray squirrels.”

  “Why?” Toaff had wondered, and “They want to,” she’d answered, so “How do you know?” he asked, but she just sniffed.

  Sometimes Toaff wondered if he was the only squirrel on the whole farm who had questions. He hoped he wasn’t.

  He watched the crow out of sight before he circled up the maple’s trunk, careful to leave a few branches over his head. Everybody said that hawks and eagles and ospreys were always on the hunt, especially on a winter day. No squirrel left himself exposed to danger from above. No squirrel who hoped to live another day.

  Toaff hoped to live a lot of another days.

  From high up he could see the two long lines of bare-branched maples, marking the sides of the snowy drive. Those maples would make two pathways a squirrel could travel along. They even offered a couple of long-branched connections where a squirrel could cross from one side of the drive to the other, without having to touch the ground. The drive was perilous for squirrels because of the machines, machines that carried humans around and crushed a squirrel without even noticing what they were doing.

  No one in Toaff’s den left their side of the drive, where their dead pine stood beside two young firs at the edge of a pasture, near to a stone wall and a safe distance from any machine. No one crossed the drive to the woods that grew over there. Everyone knew that their side of the drive was the best place to forage, and the big hollow deep in the dead pine was the best place to have their nests. Their pine had died a long time ago and bugs had burrowed into the soft places where branches had broken off; then woodpeckers had hunted for those bugs, drilling into the wood; and after that, squirrels finished the job of turning the hollow spaces into one large cavern. When Toaff asked his mother, “What’s a woodpecker?” she said it was a bird. “Like a crow?” he asked, and Braff said, “Not a bit,” as if Braff already knew everything and Toaff didn’t know anything.

  Braff had never been this far from their dead pine, so Toaff thought he would go a little farther. Whuffling with nervousness a
nd excitement, he made his way down the line of maples. At the fourth tree, where the stone wall separated their pasture from the woods beyond, he saw a long branch that stretched out across the drive meet a maple branch from the other side. What if I—?

  He leaped.

  Once across, he sat up on a branch, entirely on alert. He sniffed the cold air and listened. Were those voices? Was that squirrels talking?

  Toaff couldn’t see even a shadow moving. But it sounded as if the voices were coming closer, so he ran down the maple trunk to meet them. But these squirrel voices were filled with slow churring sounds, not at all like the quick chuk-chukkings in his own den, and they were quarreling.

  “Mine!”

  “Mine!”

  “Did you see him?” asked an excited voice.

  “I saw it first!”

  “I got it first!”

  “You’re a thief!”

  “You stole mine yesterday!”

  “Did you see how far he jumped?” the excited voice asked.

  Toaff stepped forward to greet them and from then on things happened too fast:

  Toaff saw a squirrel who didn’t have a familiar fat, furry gray shape. This squirrel was small and rusty red. Bright white circles ringed his eyes. Toaff had never seen any squirrel who looked like that, but, he reminded himself, he hadn’t been alive very long and there was a lot he hadn’t seen. He could tell by the head and tail that this couldn’t be anything other than a squirrel, so he decided not to be afraid.

  The wild-eyed little red squirrel sat up on his haunches to stare at Toaff. “I saw you!” he said, in that excited voice. “Leaping! It was…Can you do it again?”

  Before Toaff could answer, other voices broke in, voices as ugly and angry as voices full of soft churring sounds can be. More small red squirrels, too many of them, rushed at him. They held their tails stiff and high and they snarled, “Get out! Get out—now!”

  “He was flying!” the first little squirrel said. “Didn’t you see?” and Toaff thought that flying was a word that soared up and out and across.

  “That’s exact—” he started to agree.

  “We’ll bite!” cried the other red squirrels. “We’ve got teeth! We bite!” they shouted. “Get away! You better get away from us!” They closed in on him, in a crowd, and bared their teeth.

  Toaff ran. That was all he could do. They were squirrels and could climb right up a tree after him. All he could do was run. If he could just get across the drive…He ran out onto the packed snow.

  A loud, grinding machine sound drowned out the snarling voices. Out of the corner of his eye, Toaff saw a machine rushing at him. It came so fast he knew he would never make it to the other side. He spun around to retreat, but that was where all those red squirrels were, and besides, the machine was too close. He knew it. He did the one thing he could do: He dashed ahead of the machine, up the drive, turning so fast he barely had time to breathe. If he could get far enough ahead, he could swerve away to the other side. He had no other chance, he knew.

  Toaff ran, and the machine was right behind him, and he didn’t even dare to turn his head to see if he was drawing ahead, it was so close, and so loud, and it was hard enough trying to gasp in air….

  He was at the end of his strength. He knew it. He couldn’t lift his paws for one more step. The machine was going to roll over him, and crush him, and he would be dead. There was no way to avoid it. He stopped running and curled up, his fat tail wrapped around him as if he was in his nest about to go to sleep instead of lying in snow right in the middle of the drive, waiting for a machine to kill him.

  The machine roared—was it glad?—so loudly that all the air around Toaff jammed into his ears and he couldn’t hear anything. He squeezed his eyes shut and the air of the machine rushed at him, and all over him. Then it was gone and the machine’s roar was moving away along the drive.

  Toaff uncurled his tail and dashed to his own side of the drive to hide behind a tree before the machine could come after him again. Too weak to climb, he huddled against the trunk to catch his breath, to stop his shaking, to try to understand what had happened.

  Because nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

  But that was impossible. He couldn’t think, for all the fear still skittering around inside his head, and maybe he saw red squirrels moving in the shadowy woods, across the drive—

  Toaff fled.

  Not until he had made his way back up into the horse chestnut did Toaff know he was safe, and even then he didn’t feel safe. He felt jittery and uneasy. He couldn’t stop thinking, the memories all jumbled up—flying, the little red squirrel said; kaah-kaah, the crow said; we bite! snarled voices; and the huge machine roared. He had to try hard to stop hearing them, or seeing the bright white rings around those squirrels’ eyes, and the wide snow-covered drive that separated him from safety. He was working so hard not to remember that he almost didn’t notice the way a fine snow had started to fill the icy air.

  When he did notice, Toaff scurried down the horse chestnut trunk to scramble up the dead pine and tumble into a familiar, friendly lightlessness. Two voices greeted him. “About time,” said Braff. His mother, because she was a mother, asked, “Did you find something to eat?”

  Toaff was so glad to be safe in the wide warm den, with its two big nests and its stores of food, that he boasted, “I jumped across. Right through the air. I went from one maple to the next and never touched the ground.”

  “I already did that,” Braff answered.

  “A crow was watching me,” Toaff added.

  “Why would a crow watch you?” Braff scoffed. “What’s so special about you?” he asked, then answered himself, “I can tell you what: nothing.”

  So Toaff did what all creatures do when their littermates refuse to admire them. He poked his nose into Braff’s ear and snuffled, tickling it, then moved down to the soft place under Braff’s front leg to snuffle there until Braff couldn’t help but whuffle. “Don’t do that,” Braff protested as he twisted around, whuffling, to snuffle under Toaff’s front leg, and the two of them became a furry ball wrapped around with thick, silvery tails, rolling about in the darkness and whuffling wildly. Until their mother’s voice told them to “Stop that foolishness, you two! Just stoppit!”

  They stopped.

  “Did you find something to eat?” his mother asked again. “Are you hungry? Shall I find you something in the stores?”

  “I can do it myself,” Toaff said, and went to the stores, where he picked out a couple of seeds.

  “Aren’t you going to tell us more about this crow?” Braff asked, to make fun of him.

  “I don’t know any more,” Toaff admitted. “It kaahed, the way crows do, and I think it might have been saying something.”

  “Crows have more important things to do than talk to a squirrel too young to know that jumping isn’t such a great achievement,” one of the adults told him.

  “I didn’t mean just jump,” Toaff protested. “I meant to say leap.” But really he was thinking of that wide-winged word, flying.

  “Same thing,” said Braff.

  Toaff gave up trying to explain.

  He reported, “I saw squirrels across the drive.”

  A short, sharp silence greeted this announcement. Then, “Were they red?” Old Criff asked.

  “They were,” Toaff told him.

  “Did they have crazy eyes?”

  “You mean with white rings around them?”

  “Stay away from them, Toaff,” Old Criff said. “I’m serious. Those are Churrchurrs. They’re vicious, Churrchurrs are, nasty little things.”

  “They did threaten me,” Toaff admitted.

  “They’re dangerous. They hate us,” Old Criff explained.

  “Why do they hate us?” Toaff asked.

  “And we hate them.”
r />   “Why do we hate them?” Toaff asked.

  His mother had gotten suspicious. “You didn’t go across the drive, did you? You wouldn’t be so foolish as to go into the woods across the drive, would you?”

  While Toaff was trying to think of what to say, Braff was already announcing, “He did! I know he did! Look at the way his tail is curling under him. It always does that when he’s done something he knows he shouldn’t.”

  Toaff straightened his tail.

  “Why would you do that?” his mother asked. “You know better.”

  “Anyway, I’m back,” Toaff said, a little cross now, and especially at Braff. “Do machines hate us too? Because a machine almost killed me but I—”

  “Machines don’t almost kill. They do it.”

  “But I got away, so that can’t be true. The machine tried to get me but it missed.”

  “Machines don’t miss.”

  “I don’t know about you, Toaff,” Old Criff said. “Crows that talk to you. Machines that miss you. It sounds like stories to me.”

  Voices chuk-chukked general agreement about this and Toaff knew it would do no good to argue. He was getting the heavy feeling of only-ness, which was about the exact opposite of the leaping feeling, so he went to his nest. Soaff was curled up asleep there, so he poked her with his nose. For wild animals, there’s no floating along on the river that separates sleep from waking. No wild animal has time for yawning and stretching and trying to remember dreams. Instantly, Soaff was awake and alert.