Toaff's Way Read online

  “Yes,” said a greatly relieved Toaff, who, it turned out, was not all that confident of his ability to outjump and outrun so many Churrchurrs in his weakened state.

  “Understood,” said Nilf, and when he glanced at Toaff, his dark eyes within their white circles sparkled wildly with the victory.

  * * *

  —

  They weren’t very far from the drive. When they had climbed up a maple, the first thing Toaff looked for was a horse chestnut tree. It stood where he remembered, spreading out wide branches from which half of the leaves had already fallen and those that were left drooped down, brown. He saw the big white nest-house and then, looking the other way, the lines of maples with the drive curving between them. At the end of the pasture, across the drive, were the woods beyond, just as he remembered. Everything he saw was familiar.

  Nilf was looking back behind them while Toaff was looking ahead, and Toaff finally asked, “What about the holly bushes makes you think they…,” but he didn’t know how to finish his question without sounding as if he was starting a quarrel. He thought for a minute, then asked the same question, but differently.

  “Are the holly bushes something special the Churrchurrs keep for food?”

  “No!” cried Nilf. “We never would! They take care of us. We’d never eat them, no matter how hungry we were.” He explained, “Where there’s a holly bush, it’s a good place for us. Away from Grays. Near food and safe for burrows. The holly bushes take care of us.”

  Toaff thought about that for a minute, then asked, “All squirrels? Or just all Churrchurrs?”

  “Not everybody agrees,” Nilf said, and he added, “But I think all of all of us, every squirrel there is.” Then he changed the subject quickly, as if he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Where will you go?”

  But Toaff told him, “I’d think it would have to be every squirrel, but how do you know it’s what hollies do?”

  “I don’t, not really. I wonder, sometimes. But I think maybe,” Nilf said.

  They looked at one another for a time that didn’t feel long, although it might have been. Then Nilf asked again, “Where will you go now?”

  As soon as he had seen the row of tall maples and the familiar pasture, Toaff had decided. “To where I used to live. I’ll find a den or I’ll make a drey.”

  “Aren’t you going to join the other Grays?”

  “What other Grays? I never saw any on my side of the drive. Besides, even if there are some, why would I want to join up with them?”

  “Because…because Grays always gather as many as you can all together when you’re getting ready to drive us out of our territory.”

  “I don’t want to drive you out of your territory,” Toaff said, and he meant it. Although, even as he said it, and meant it, he had to remember the talk in his den that long-ago winter afternoon. He remembered how Old Criff hated the little red squirrels, and didn’t trust them, and how everyone—except him—had seemed to agree with Old Criff. “I don’t,” he repeated.

  “Well, some Grays have moved into our woods,” Nilf reported. “They’re so wild, and fierce, they don’t even mind being close to the road. You know about the road, don’t you?”

  “I’ve never seen it,” Toaff admitted.

  “Neither have I, but I know it’s more dangerous even than the fisher, or an eagle. There are no holly bushes anywhere near the road, but those Grays aren’t afraid of anything. Everyone knows it’s just a matter of time before they attack. To drive us out. They hate us and we hate them.”

  Toaff protested. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

  “The rest of us do,” Nilf answered. Reminding himself of that seemed to change something. He raised his tail high and announced, “We’re evened up now. You saved me and I saved you and now I’m going back to where I belong.”

  “I’m glad you were there,” Toaff said. “Thank you. I don’t hate you,” he added.

  “Neither do I,” Nilf admitted.

  “And I don’t plan to start,” Toaff said.

  “Neither do I, but you can’t come back,” Nilf warned.

  “I’m not saying goodbye,” Toaff warned him right back.

  Nilf whuffled. “Neither am I,” he agreed.

  Toaff didn’t watch Nilf go away. He was busy going away himself, and besides, he knew they would meet up again, sometime. He had saved the Churrchurr’s life and the Churrchurr had saved his life, and now they belonged together, whatever any other Grays or Churrchurrs had to say about it. But Toaff had a den to find and a nest to build. He leaped across the drive, landing on a long maple branch that stretched toward him from the pasture side. He ran along that branch until he came to the rough, solid trunk, where he rested, waiting to be ready to go on. In that stop-rest-go-on manner, he traveled all the way up the drive to the horse chestnut tree.

  He hoped there might be a den waiting there, or a drey. He didn’t really think there would be but he hoped anyway. When a crow kaah-kaahed in the pasture beside him, Toaff knew that kaah-kaah could mean anything. What a kaah-kaah really meant, he decided, was Be alert! Which was always good advice for a squirrel.

  He got to the horse chestnut, climbed up, and sat looking around. In one direction he saw the low stone wall by the apple trees and the grass around the nest-house, flat and brown after the cold fall nights. In the other direction he saw the two firs standing guard next to a flat circle that was all that was left of his dead pine, and the pasture, and the woods beyond. Most important, just below where he sat on the horse chestnut trunk he saw a ragged, shallow dent where a branch had been ripped off. A den there would be high enough to be safe from ground-bound hunters like foxes and low enough within the tree’s branches to keep a squirrel safe from raptors.

  And from the fisher, too?

  At the memory, Toaff shivered. He tried not to remember. He reminded himself that he’d never seen the fisher before, and he’d never heard of it either, so maybe it didn’t like to hunt so close to where humans lived. Probably its territory was in the woods on the other side of the drive. Probably it was dead, anyway, and he didn’t have to worry about it. If he ever saw a fisher in this pasture, that was the time to worry. Now wasn’t the time for anything but finding a place to nest until he had made himself a den for the winter.

  In not very long he’d found an empty bird’s nest, comfortable enough for temporary shelter, and scrambled down to forage around the horse chestnut. A squirrel with a den in this tree could spend the long winter in comfort, Toaff knew. All around its roots lay chestnuts, kept safe within their spiny shells. Nearby, the branches of the two fir trees were filled with cones. Not too far away, the slim trunks of the apple trees were surrounded by fruit. This had always been a good place, Toaff knew. That night, as darkness filled the air, Toaff curled up in a bird’s nest high in the horse chestnut tree, with his tail wrapped around him, a full stomach, and a plan.

  Day after day, Toaff used his teeth to hollow out a den, gnawing deep into the horse chestnut. The days were already much shorter and the nights longer and colder, and he knew it wasn’t long before winter would bring snow, and cold winds. He wanted his den to lie deep within the broad trunk of the tree, protected from harsh winter weather. Day after day, Toaff chewed and clawed at the wood, and while he worked, the last long chestnut leaves drifted down from their branches.

  When the hollow space was large enough, Toaff gathered twigs and dried grass. He added two black crow feathers to the sides and remembered the thick, soft sheep fur that the Littles had found. He was sorry he didn’t have any of that to line his nest with. But the finished nest was comfortable enough, and he knew that the more nights he slept in it, the softer it would become.

  Once he had a large den and a wide nest ready, Toaff set to work gathering stores. He buried mounds of the horse chestnuts in middens hidden among the roots of his tree. He carr
ied pinecones and any seeds he found up into his den. He worked constantly, day after day, gathering. He didn’t have to be told that winter would be long, and cold, and difficult to live through.

  Every day, Toaff heard the dogs yarking and the humans talking, although not singing. Every day, machines traveled up and down the drive and Mister moved the cows into and out of the pasture to forage. Crows kaah-kaahed. The cats stalked along beside the nest-house and slept in the sunny space in front of the nest-barn. Every day, Toaff wasn’t alone on the farm—but he hadn’t seen another gray squirrel for such a long time that he sometimes worried that he never again would.

  As worries often do, this worry led Toaff directly to an idea: What if I take a look around?

  He had the idea and then he waited for several days to see if he kept on thinking it was a good one. He knew how much his legs liked leaping and how much his curiosity wanted to find out about the Grays Nilf had talked about; he also knew that a bad idea could lead to trouble. So he waited, to be as sure as he could be.

  When he decided that he was sure enough, he set off. That late-fall morning, the air was cold, the wind was sharp, and clouds covered the whole sky. Toaff took a deep happy breath and leaped along down the drive, away from the nest-house, to take a look around.

  The drive turned out to be longer than he had expected but Toaff didn’t mind that, not at all. He had regained his full strength, and a longer drive meant more leaping, from one maple to another to another, and another after that. He kept to his side of the drive, first moving beside the pasture and then leaping along from tree to tree by the woods beyond. There, at every maple, he stopped to listen, and look, and sniff the air, but there were no signs of gray squirrels. He heard no chuk-chukking in the trees and saw no scurrying movement on the trunks. Once, perched high in a maple, he called out, “Anyone? Anyone here?” and there was no answer. It seemed that no squirrel had discovered the woods beyond and of course Toaff wondered what it would be like to live in a place where you were the first squirrel ever to be there, and to forage for stores where no other squirrel had ever put down a paw. Everything would be new. Nothing would be known. It would be frightening and exciting, and maybe wonderful.

  He wondered if he would be more only, or less, if he was the first.

  Wondering, Toaff leaped through patches of shadows and splotches of sunlight until, looking ahead to where the next maple should have been, he saw the way forward blocked by a wide black strip. The strip looked hard, and unpleasant. It reminded him of the drive, but it was much darker and wider and straighter. Toaff sat in the last maple, looking down at it. He looked, and listened, and sniffed. The air tasted unpleasant, like machines, and that led him to guess that the strip was probably the road. It certainly looked the way a dangerous thing should, dark and unwelcoming. More woods grew on the other side, and hadn’t Braff said that was where he was going? Toaff wondered if he dared to try to cross the road.

  At that moment something roared, and charged straight toward him. A huge, loud thing swept up the probably-a-road, right beneath the branch Toaff sat on. The wind that raced with it pulled at the branch with so much power, he was almost sucked off.

  Toaff dug his nails in and held on.

  The huge thing roared under him and thundered off along the probably-a-road. Trembling, Toaff scurried back to the safety of the trunk. He waited until the last echoes had died away and the tree branches had stopped waving. He couldn’t even guess what he had seen. It looked like a machine, but bigger, higher, louder, and longer, and no machine he’d ever seen went that fast. He had barely had time to see it but he was pretty sure it was some kind of machine, with round legs to run on and no paws. If he had been in the middle of the road, he’d have been squashed flat. There was no way a squirrel could outrun that machine. If a squirrel was on the road and one of those things came along, then goodbye, squirrel.

  This taking a look around was at an end.

  He turned to go back along the drive. He wanted to get far from the road, and fast. But after a long leap from the second to the third maple, he heard an unfamiliar voice. He halted.

  A voice?

  “Toaff!”

  The voice came out of the woods across the drive and seemed to have no body attached to it. It was as if a tree knew his name, and called to him.

  That trees couldn’t talk, he was sure of. Wasn’t he?

  “I know you’re Toaff,” the tree said.

  This was as bad as the road, except entirely different. What should I—?

  A large gray squirrel jumped out into view on a branch of the maple just across the drive. “You are Toaff,” he announced.

  Toaff recognized him. “Braff,” he said.

  “It took you long enough to find us,” Braff said, and he turned away. “Let’s go,” he said over his shoulder, and when Toaff didn’t move, he asked, “Now what are you waiting for?”

  Toaff felt shoved back into the nest in the dead pine, where he didn’t know anything and Braff knew everything. This was not a good feeling. He remembered the last quarrel he’d had with Braff. “I thought you were going across the road,” he said, and stayed right where he was.

  “The crows warned us not to,” Braff answered. “We were going to. We weren’t afraid and we got to the road. We came right to the edge of it. It’s easy to know you’re at the edge because—”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Humph,” said Braff. “Maybe you have. Maybe you haven’t. But we were about to run across when the crows showed us what happens when an animal goes on the road. They showed us….It was something dead, something with long thin legs, right in front of us, all broken and bloody and out on the road….The road got it.”

  Now Braff’s voice got so low Toaff could barely hear what he was saying.

  “The crows were carrying it away, but it was too big for them to take all at once and it looked almost as if they were eating it….” Braff stopped speaking, to swallow twice. “It wasn’t nice to see but they knew we needed to. They wanted to warn us not to touch the road.”

  “Oh,” said Toaff, who wasn’t sure any squirrel could figure out what a crow meant, and also suspected that it was a machine, not the road, that did the damage, but knew better than to try to tell Braff anything.

  “Anyway, Soaff will be glad to see you,” Braff said.

  “Soaff?” Toaff asked. He thought of his other littermate. Soaff was a soft, safe memory, as welcome as summer mornings. “Where is she? How will I find her?”

  “You just did. Follow me.”

  “I have my own nest now,” Toaff answered. “In the horse chestnut tree.”

  Braff was silent. “Humph,” he said eventually. “Well then,” he said. “If that’s the way you want to be,” he said. “But when you decide to come over, remember to tell the guard to come get me.”

  “A guard? You have guards? Why?”

  “What’s wrong with you, Toaff? We have to have guards so the Churrchurrs don’t sneak in and steal from the middens we’ve been filling. They live in part of this woods, closer to the nest-barn, in case you’ve forgotten. Winter’s coming, in case you haven’t noticed. We need guards so when the Churrchurrs attack, we won’t be taken by surprise.”

  “Why would Churrchurrs attack you?”

  “To drive us away. So they can steal our stores.”

  Toaff couldn’t think how to show Braff that this wasn’t true. He couldn’t think what to do, but just then three crows came kaah-kaahing into the sky behind him, flying low, close to the tops of the pines. What if they were telling him something about those woods?

  “You could move across the drive into these woods,” he told Braff. “You could carry your stores across, and over here you wouldn’t have to worry about Churrchurrs.”

  “I’m not running away from any Churrchurr.”

  “No other
squirrels live in these woods.”

  “They’d think we’re afraid of them and get greedier. They hate us.”

  “But Braff, they say you’re going to attack them, to steal their supplies, and take over their territory,” Toaff explained.

  “That just goes to show,” Braff answered. “They’re liars as well as thieves.”

  “But all squirrels steal from other squirrels,” Toaff pointed out.

  “Not like they do,” Braff maintained. “You don’t know anything, Toaff. But I’ve got to get back to my post. I’m on guard. It’s important work. If any one of those Churrchurrs shows even his nose, he’ll be sorry. I can promise you that,” and Braff was gone.

  Toaff went back up the drive, slowly and a little sadly, thinking. He knew what he knew about Churrchurrs and he thought what he thought about crows. But he was the only squirrel who wondered about things. Except maybe Nilf, was his first thought, and I wonder if Soaff does, the next, after which he felt a lot better.

  On a cloudy morning that was cold as ice, Toaff ran up into a maple. The air smelled of something he half remembered, but he had another idea for the morning and didn’t follow that memory to wherever it might lead. He leaped from maple to maple along the drive, from the first to the second tree, from the second to the third, and from there to the fourth, which had two long strong branches stretching across to the woods across the drive. Where Nilf lived.

  Toaff sat there for a long time, hoping the little red squirrel would come. In all the time he waited, however, he didn’t hear any chur-churring and he began to wonder, worrying—or began to worry, wondering—Had the Churrchurrs been driven away by Braff’s Grays? But he didn’t see or hear any gray squirrels either. He hoped that nothing had happened to change everything, because he had the idea that if he and Nilf could get along, so could other Grays and Churrchurrs. When he was with Nilf, eating together and talking, Toaff knew for sure and certain that this was true. He didn’t want to forget Nilf and he didn’t want Nilf to forget him. Someday, he was sure of it, he would arrive at the maple and see Nilf, waiting for him across the drive.