Toaff's Way Page 13

  Peering up into the high branches of the first maple tree, Toaff caught sight of the drey, tilted badly to one side but still safe on its branches. So that was all right. Then he saw that two squirrels stared out over its edge toward the feeder, where— He had to dash across the drive to see what they were staring at— It was gray and furry and on the ground, half hidden among the leaves of a fallen branch.

  The gray and furry thing was not moving.

  Toaff couldn’t move either. Snake and Fox were making a slow, stalking approach toward it. They hadn’t noticed him and Toaff didn’t want to find out what they had in mind for a squirrel who was already dead. He unfroze his legs and turned around, to head back.

  When he moved, the two remaining Lucky Ones noticed him. “Look what you did to Tzaaf!” they called. “Just look!” they called after him as he dashed back across the drive.

  Toaff would have liked to stop and tell them that he hadn’t done anything to Tzaaf, that it was the storm that did it. He wanted to call back up to them that the storm wasn’t any of his doing. It wasn’t anything the humans did either, in his opinion, because look at all the broken branches, and humans liked the trees, otherwise wouldn’t they cut them all down? It’s not my fault, he would have liked to have told them, loud and clear, and he would have, if it hadn’t been for the danger of cats and the sadness of that mound of gray fur.

  Maybe he would go with the Littles, after all. Maybe he should finally do what Braff had told him, long ago at winter’s end, even if it was bossy Braff who suggested it. Maybe, after all, it would be better to live behind the nest-barn with the Littles, and keep on being the one who had to know about things.

  When he got back to the fir, Leaf greeted him happily. “I knew you’d help us. Say said.”

  All Toaff answered was “Let’s go.”

  He wanted to be far from that drey, and far from humans, too.

  They traveled in a line, with Toaff in the lead. They listened intently, all ears cocked. They looked as sharply as they could in all directions, to be sure no cats were on the prowl, and Toaff didn’t tell them that he was pretty sure the cats were occupied elsewhere. They ran behind the high mound of dirt, then over to the garden.

  In single file, with Toaff still first and Leaf at the rear, they dashed from pole to pole around the garden to the stone wall beyond it. After that, they moved through the branches and leaves the storm had tossed around, following the stone wall.

  Then the chain saw screeched and the Littles scattered, squeezing into any available crack among the rocks. They really did need him, Toaff thought; he was the one who knew what was happening. He went from one quivering Little to the other, waiting for the chain saw to fall silent to explain quietly, “It’s nothing to do with us. Mister’s cutting up the branches that the wind blew down. He’s going to take them away, like he did my dead pine. It’s nothing to do with us. Remember what I told you about my dead pine? Mister’s cutting up some big branches over by the nest-house. He’s nowhere near here.”

  Eventually the journey resumed, until the stone wall reached the nest-barn wall, which loomed over them, and behind the nest-barn they found a small, grassy pasture. “We’re here! This is behind the nest-barn! Is this behind the nest-barn, Toaff?”

  Toaff considered the question. One side of the pasture was the high nest-barn wall but the three other sides were surrounded by wooden poles held apart by long pieces of bare branches. It would be easy for a squirrel to go in and out of the pasture. There were no animals in the pasture, but there was a small nest-house huddled up close to the nest-barn. Nothing was moving, not in the small nest-house or in the grassy pasture or in the woods that stretched away all around it. Except for the sound of the chain saw from far away, there was nothing to hear but the usual sounds of insects and the wind. “I think it is,” he decided, adding, “Yes, it is.” Because it had to be.

  Toaff wondered why Braff and the others had left this place, and then he wondered if they had safely crossed the road. He saw how the woods were crowded with pines and firs and spruces, which meant plenty of pinecones for a squirrel’s winter hoard. He looked for squirrels, for an entrance to a den, for a drey. He looked for places among the trees at the edges where a drey might be built, or to see the kind of hollow that might be the entrance to a den. He stood still, looking about and wondering.

  The Littles were running around and calling out.

  “Sheep were here!”

  “Look! This is some of their fur. Look, Toaff!”

  “It’s sticking right on this pole!”

  “Smell that, Toaff!”

  Toaff sniffed. A faint odor hung in the air, something sharp and a little oily. It was unpleasant, so Toaff went back to considering the woods, ignoring the high voices of the Littles. He remembered that Braff had said the sheep stayed in something called a pen behind the nest-barn, which this certainly could be, since pen was a word with definite edges, just like this pasture.

  Meanwhile, the Littles ran along from pole to pole, calling out to one another.

  “Sheep fur!”

  “It’s everywhere!”

  “We’re here!”

  “We did it!”

  Toaff said nothing, but he stared into the woods, searching for a possible den, until—suddenly, unexpectedly, and entirely surprisingly—he knew exactly where he was. He knew that if he crossed the pen and went into the trees, always keeping the nest-barn at the same shoulder, and jumped through the trees until he reached the edge of those woods, he’d arrive at the drive. He knew that when he reached the drive, he would see the two long rows of maples. He knew that if he leaped across the drive and then from maple to maple up along it, back toward the nest-house, he would come to the wide-limbed horse chestnut tree. Toaff stared off into the woods, as if he could actually see those maples, and the drive, and that horse chestnut. He whuffled to himself, wondering if he was going to end up right back at the safe place where he had started out. Maybe he was a Lucky One after all.

  That thought drove the whuffling out of him because it made him remember the limp gray body. In turn, this sad memory was driven off when Leaf cried out, “Toaff? Where are you?”

  Toaff wheeled around. But he couldn’t see her. Also, he couldn’t see Neef or Tief, even if he could hear their voices, high and clear above the faint far-off hum of the chain saw.

  “Toaff? Here we are!”

  “Wait’ll you see!”

  The voices came from the little nest-house. Toaff scurried around a pole and into the grassy pen, and then he could see Tief and Neef inside the nest-house, their noses snuffling on the dirt floor. Leaf was climbing up into a top corner, where some boards joined up, like branches joined at the trunk of a tree.

  The whole wide front of that nest-house was an entrance. Toaff ran over to explore it with the others. When he entered, Leaf called down to him, “We can build a drey up here, can’t we, Toaff? We can build a big, deep drey up here, and it will be dry, and safe, too, with that top over our heads. No raptor could get through that top. Do you know how to build a drey?”

  That, Toaff needed to think about, and he was having trouble thinking because the oily unpleasant smell was so strong in this nest-house, and there was something else, too, a tiny trail of bad smell….

  “Toaff!” Leaf insisted. “You do know how to build a drey. I know you do, you came outside long before we did, you’ve seen everything on the farm. Let’s get to work.” She whuffled sharply and happily and announced to them all, “This place is why the sheep wanted the dogs to tell us to come here. This is where we’re supposed to live.”

  Toaff raised his nose to follow that thin trail as it wound in and out of the stronger smell. In its own way it was just as unpleasant as the oily one, but it was not as nasty as he happened to know it could be.

  Toaff had recognized the smell of mouse. Where was the
mouse?

  Leaf was asking, “We could put a drey up here, couldn’t we, Toaff? If we built one?”

  Was the smell fading away? He couldn’t be sure.

  “Is a drey safe?” Neef worried.

  Toaff turned his attention back to the Littles, and told them, “To build a drey, you need some branches thin enough to bend. Then you rest them close together on strong branches. Then you put leaves and dry grass all around and through them. That makes the bottom and the sides. Then you want new, soft grass, or even moss, to line the inside. There should be moss in the woods behind the stone wall, and there’s dry grass right here.”

  “I can find branches!” Tief cried. “I can find moss! I find things!”

  Leaf was already scrambling down to the ground. “Let Toaff finish,” she said.

  Toaff moved toward a loose pile of dry grass gathered up in one corner. “This is perfect for the sides of a drey.” Was the thin smell growing stronger? Was it coming out of this dry grass? “Unless it’s damp,” he said.

  Before he could stick his nose into the mound, a high voice squeaked out from it, “It’s not wet.”

  “But you can’t take it,” added a second high voice, and a third completed the thought, “Because it’s our nest.”

  At that claim, three gray mice emerged from the hay and stood in a row, shaking off the bits and pieces of grass that clung to their heads and backs. “You’re squirrels,” one said, and “Aren’t you?” squeaked the next, and then the third explained, “Because of your tails.”

  At the first strange squeaking sound, Leaf and Neef and Tief had all fled up to the high boards. They sat up on their haunches, chuk-chukking wildly to drive the strangers off. Because they were the Littles and didn’t know any better, Toaff had to calm them down before he could talk to the mice. He called up, “It’s all right. They’re mice. They can’t hurt you.”

  “Yes I could,” the first mouse objected.

  “If I wanted to,” the second added, and the third completed the thought, “But I don’t want to.”

  They stood in a line right in front of him, little noses pointing up, black beady eyes shining with curiosity, long tails stiff and high and brave. They were plump and smooth-skinned, with little round legs and delicate bones in their paws. Their tails were long and hairless. They were much smaller than the Littles, no bigger than a squirrel’s back leg, and their boldness made Toaff want to whuffle.

  “You’re right, I am a squirrel, and so are those others,” he said, in the friendliest voice he had. “My name is Toaff.”

  “And I’m Tief!” came the cry from above, which was quickly shushed by Leaf, who murmured, “Let Toaff take care of it.”

  The mice ignored the interruption. They introduced themselves as proudly as if they were the size of cats, “Fiddle,” “Faddle,” “Fuddle,” and explained, “We’re on our way to find the lake,” then, “Uncle Fredle told us about it,” finishing, “But I think we got lost.”

  At the mention of the lake, Tief and Neef, followed by a worried Leaf, came back down to stand on the ground behind Toaff to ask their own questions. “Did the sheep tell you to find the lake? They told us to come here. They never told us where the lake is.”

  “Sheep can’t tell you anything,” said a mouse, and the next added, “They don’t know anything.” The third explained, “They just do what the dogs tell them.”

  “You’ve got it backward,” Leaf told them.

  “It’s the dogs who made the sheep leave this pen last spring,” Fiddle argued.

  “They’ll make them come back in the fall,” added Faddle.

  “They showed us how to get here,” Fuddle said, “because the dogs take care of us. Especially Sadie.”

  “There isn’t any dog called Say-Dee,” the Littles said.

  “Woo-hah, woo-hah, they don’t know anything!” the mice said to one another, and “We do, too!” answered the Littles.

  But Toaff had a question, not a quarrel. “How do you know all those things about dogs and sheep? When you’re so small?”

  The three mice were glad to explain everything to the squirrels. They were house mice in winter, then they moved outside in warm weather, with Uncle Fredle. He was the bravest and smartest of any of them and they wanted to be just like him. Except now he was old and they didn’t want to be old. They explained that house mice learned as much as they could from everyone on the farm, except spiders, of course, or ants, and nobody had anything to learn from chickens, and sheep weren’t much better, and they had never understood a word said by the cows. Even the dogs couldn’t understand sheep and cows—

  The Littles interrupted. “You’ve got it all wrong,” they argued. “Don’t you know? It’s the sheep who tell the dogs what to tell us to do.”

  The mice disagreed, “No they don’t.”

  Before they could quarrel about that, too, Toaff asked the mice, “Can you understand what humans say?”

  It turned out that the big white nest-house had a lot of smaller nests inside it, and one of these was called the kitchen. The humans were in and out of the kitchen, all day long, so a kitchen mouse heard humans talking all the time to one another. “And singing, too,” said Fiddle. “Singing songs.”

  “Because sometimes they get tired of just using talking,” explained Faddle.

  “It’s just Missus that sings,” Fuddle reminded his brothers. “Mister and Angus are too busy, and Sadie takes care of the baby. Because the dogs take care of everybody, even the baby,” he announced to the squirrels.

  “Is singing all silvery, and long?” Toaff asked. Singing was the right word for that kind of sound. But the Littles had a different concern.

  “When will the sheep get here?” they asked, and had an explanation of their own. “The sheep want us to meet them here.”

  “The sheep will come when the dogs tell them to,” said Fiddle.

  “They’ll come when the dogs want them to,” said Faddle.

  “Because the dogs tell the sheep what to do,” Fuddle reminded the Littles.

  “You’ve got it backward,” Leaf said.

  “No, no!” said the mice, all together.

  “You don’t understand,” said Fiddle.

  “If you stay until winter, you will,” said Faddle.

  “Because the dogs will bring the sheep back for the winter,” Fuddle explained.

  Toaff interrupted again. “Can you show me singing?”

  “Missus gave us our names,” Fiddle announced.

  “She sang about us,” Faddle agreed.

  “Because we’re always together, all three of us,” Fuddle explained.

  “Three blind mice!” they squeaked in unison, and squeaked it again. “Three blind mice! See how they run! See how they run!” Then all three mice began to run around in circles, making high squeaking woo-hah sounds, until they got dizzy and began to stumble, and Fuddle tripped and landed on his nose, all three of them woo-hahing all the while.

  Their noises didn’t sound in the least like the silvery sound, but also they did, sort of, almost, in a way. The kind of winding, moonlit sound Missus made was hidden somewhere in the middle of the squeaky blind-mice noises. Singing, Toaff said to himself. He was sure he couldn’t do it, singing, not even in a ruined way like these mice, but he was glad to know its name. When he said the word softly to himself, inside his own head, he could almost hear her voice, singing.

  Once the Littles had arrived behind the nest-barn and found the sheep pen there, all they wanted to do was wait for the sheep to arrive, and wonder how long it would be, and talk about how glad the sheep would be to see that the squirrels had done as they were told. If Toaff suggested they practice moving through the woods, climbing up and down trunks and jumping from tree to tree, “We have to be here,” the Littles argued.

  “Why do we need to know how to jum
p?” Tief asked, and Leaf explained, “We don’t need to jump, here behind the nest-barn.” And when Toaff wanted to show them where pine and fir and spruce cones, and horse chestnuts and acorns, too, could be found, because it was time to gather stores for the long winter that was coming, Neef objected. “The sheep are going to take care of us. They said.”

  It didn’t take more than a day or two for the Littles to build their drey up in a high corner next to the nest-barn wall. And it didn’t take them long to decide that this was what the sheep had planned all along. And it didn’t take long after that for them to start disagreeing with one another. “Of course not all of the squirrels could get here,” Tief said. “There’s just room enough for us.”

  Toaff wondered, “Did the sheep want them to die?”

  “How can we know what sheep want? But if it’s what happened…,” Leaf answered.

  “I wish our mother hadn’t died,” Neef said.

  “She didn’t mind. Don’t be such a baby.”

  “I’m not! And you wish our mother was here too, so don’t say you don’t.”

  “I’m not!”

  Toaff wasn’t surprised to hear the Littles arguing. The danger that had bound them together was now safely behind them. They were no longer so afraid. They no longer felt so helpless and weak. They no longer needed one another for comfort and safety. Of course they didn’t get along as well as they used to. But the Littles could fit more quarreling into a day than any other squirrels Toaff had ever lived with.

  Toaff soon figured out that he didn’t belong with the Littles any more than he had with the Lucky Ones. So, on the morning of the third day, he went off alone into the woods to find himself a den. A scattering of twigs and grass in a hollowed-out hole in an old maple tree might have been some other squirrel’s abandoned nest and made a good start for his own. Had Soaff maybe lived in that nest? That would make it a good place, he thought, and that afternoon he announced his move.