Toaff's Way Page 4

  Without looking, the little squirrel said, “My front—” Then he turned and saw who had spoken. He tried to back away, but one of his front legs didn’t want to touch the ground. The wild eyes stared at Toaff and he asked, “How do you do it? Because I fell, didn’t I? I remember falling. But I can jump, I’ve done it. Not like you, but— And now my leg isn’t—” He rose onto three legs, and held the fourth up above the ground. “I can’t—” He sank down again. “I guess I’m done for.”

  Toaff didn’t argue. If a squirrel couldn’t climb or run, there wasn’t much hope for him.

  “Anyway,” the little animal announced almost cheerfully, “it’s still cold enough that maybe I’ll have frozen to death before a fox finds me.”

  That fox decided Toaff. “Can you walk? Nilf, that’s your name, isn’t it? Can you walk on your other legs?”

  “How do you know my name? Have you been spying on us?”

  “Of course not. Those others said it. Can you walk?”

  “Probably. Maybe. Maybe sort of, probably. But I can’t run. Or climb.”

  “Then walk,” Toaff urged. Fox, fox, fox echoed around in his head.

  Nilf took a step, and stumbled up against Toaff. “It hurts. It’s hard to—” He held out his injured front leg. “I don’t think I— Stop staring! You’re— What’s your name, can you go away now?”

  “Toaff,” Toaff answered, and took a deep breath, to help himself stay patient. “If you leaned on me, could you walk?”

  “I can’t climb,” Nilf pointed out.

  “My den doesn’t have to be climbed into.”

  “You think I’m going to your den?”

  “I could take you to yours,” Toaff offered.

  “They’d eat you alive,” Nilf said, and explained, “They hate you.”

  “Then we’ll go to mine,” Toaff said patiently. “But we have to get moving.”

  “I can’t,” Nilf said. “It’s—it’s too far!”

  “If you stay here, you’re foxfood,” Toaff argued.

  “I don’t want to—”

  “You don’t have a choice,” Toaff argued.

  “—not with a Chukchuk, it’s—”

  “I can’t fight off a fox,” Toaff pointed out.

  “—not safe,” Nilf insisted.

  Toaff didn’t want to stand around quarreling. A moving squirrel had a chance. A squirrel standing around quarreling was asking to be someone’s dinner. “You’re coming with me,” he said. “You have to,” he announced.

  “No I don’t,” Nilf argued. “And I can’t.”

  Toaff got behind him and pushed. “Move,” he ordered. “You have to help me.”

  “I don’t want to go with you!” Nilf said, and he tried to squirm aside. “I can’t! I’ll fall!” But Toaff kept on shoving and pushing. Finally, taking a lesson from Braff, he nipped the smaller squirrel, on his rump.

  “Hey!” Nilf protested. “That was—!”

  “You have to try.”

  “All right,” Nilf said. “All right, I will. Just don’t bite me again.”

  Because Nilf had to lean against Toaff to walk, they moved in a mostly forward but partly sideways direction through the woods to the drive. Once there, they sheltered briefly under a pine. Toaff checked up the drive to the red nest and the white nest-house, then in the other direction, where the road lay. No machine was moving. He listened carefully, but heard no distant rumbling, so they went lurching slowly and clumsily across the dirt. That danger safely past, Toaff moved behind Nilf, to push him forward through the field to the broken pine.

  But it felt like the closer they got to his tree, the harder it was to push the little Churrchurr along. If he hadn’t known better, Toaff would have thought Nilf was pushing backward, trying not to be rescued. He couldn’t not want to be rescued, could he?

  The leg did have to hurt, though, because at each step, Nilf gave a little muffled whimper. So Toaff didn’t try to rush him, and he didn’t complain about how clumsy and slow their progress was. He kept moving, all of his senses alert for danger, heading home.

  The last part of the long journey was the most difficult for both of them. As they went up the slanting trunk of the broken pine, Toaff shoved at the small red rump and tried not to trip over, or be blinded by, the feathery tail. It didn’t help that Nilf seemed to be digging his claws into the wood to resist each step. It felt as if Nilf was trying to back down, not climb up. But that was so nonsensical, Toaff decided it couldn’t be true, and just kept pushing until at last he could shove Nilf up through the entrance. With a squeal of pain, his guest tumbled into the den.

  In the dim light of late afternoon inside the dead pine, Toaff watched the dark shape feel its way around until it found the soft nest. There it settled, sitting up on its haunches. Not until then did Toaff follow, asking, “Are you hungr—?”

  The little Churrchurr turned on him, teeth bared, snarling.

  Snarling? Was he as crazy as his eyes? “What is it now?” Toaff demanded.

  “Stay back,” Nilf snarled.

  “This is my den,” Toaff pointed out.

  He might as well not have spoken.

  “I may be injured and you may have been able to force me to come here, but I’ve still got teeth,” Nilf warned.

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  The answer came too quickly. “Afraid? No. Not one bit.”

  “Hunhh,” Toaff said.

  Then, “Should I be afraid of you?” Nilf wondered.

  “You’re acting afraid,” Toaff explained. He knew what fear smelled like and it was definitely fear he was smelling, coming off the little animal.

  “Whyever would I be frightened?” Nilf asked. “Except that you’re twice my size and a Gray. One of the big fat gray Chukchuks who keep trying to take over our territory.”

  This Churrchurr was one surprise after another. “Why would I want your territory?”

  Nilf didn’t have to stop and think. This was something he had always known. “Because you hate us. Also, you want our stores.” At least, talking seemed to calm him a little.

  “I’ve got plenty of stores of my own. Right here,” Toaff pointed out. “Why would I want yours?”

  Again, it was as if he hadn’t spoken. Nilf went right on. “All we have is our one little territory but that’s good enough for us. We don’t try to take more. You Grays can go anywhere you like, no matter how far off, miles and miles, everybody says, everybody knows. But you still want to take ours away from us.”

  Why would Nilf lie to him? Toaff asked himself. No reason, he answered. But Toaff had never heard anything about gray squirrels wanting to move across the drive into the Churrchurrs’ territory, so “How do you know that?” he wondered.

  “Everybody says,” Nilf answered.

  By then the Churrchurr no longer smelled of fear. Toaff took two steps closer and asked again, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Maybe.” The answer came slowly, almost reluctantly. “Maybe not.” Nilf backed away from Toaff, backing deeper into the nest.

  “Is that why they all chased after me?” Toaff asked.

  “What do you Chukchuks expect us to do?” Nilf answered.

  There was a long silence. Finally Nilf took a deep breath and said, “You know, if you’re going to kill me and eat me? I’d rather you just did it.”

  “Kill you? Eat you? Is that what you think? You do realize that if I wanted you dead, I’d have left you for a fox, don’t you? And spared myself the work of getting you up here. Think about that, Nilf,” Toaff said, and he was angry now. “Anyway, I’m hungry and I’m going to have a chestnut because—frankly?—I suspect that squirrel tastes disgusting. There’s a chestnut for you, too, if you want some.”

  “How do I know it’s not gone rotten? And gotten poisonous?”

  Toa
ff had had enough of this from the little Churrchurr, whose life he might, after all, have just saved. “You should be worried, because of course I keep a special supply of rotten chestnuts, in case there is some Churrchurr”—and Toaff rattled off the next words quickly—“who has fallen out of his own trees in his own woods across the drive, where, by the way, it’s dangerous for me to go, and been abandoned by his own friends, and I can push him across the open all the way back to my den so that, if we don’t get eaten on the way, I can poison him once we’re here. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time. That’s why I need to keep a supply of rotten chestnuts handy.”

  Nilf was silent for a long time. At last, very quietly, he asked, “How can I tell?”

  “If you don’t want to stay, you’re welcome to leave,” Toaff told him.

  “You know I can’t.”

  Toaff didn’t say anything to that. He just went over to where his stores lay in a pile. Braff was right to warn him; his supplies were dwindling. Still, he carried a chestnut over to Nilf before he took his own out to the entrance. There, he sat up on his haunches and gnawed crossly, looking at the pasture and the sky. He didn’t like all this quarreling. He’d rather wrestle and whuffle any day.

  Darkness drifted down out of the sky, spreading over the pasture and trees and the distant nest-house. In the morning, Toaff knew, Nilf would either be fine or he would be dead. That was the way with squirrels, they either died or healed, and it didn’t take long. Although if Nilf was going to die in Toaff’s den, Toaff would have to move out. Watching the slowly darkening pasture, he thought of the apple trees, which had been able to withstand the winter storm. He went back inside, considering what to do about the stores if Nilf died.

  The Churrchurr was already asleep, but as soon as Toaff got into the nest, he woke up. “Get away! I can bite even if I can’t run.”

  “It’s just me,” Toaff said. So much fierceness from such a scrawny little squirrel was ridiculous. “And it’s my own nest, if you remember.” He couldn’t stop himself from whuffling.

  “What do you mean, just you?” Nilf demanded, but he had started to whuffle, too. “You’re too big to be just anything,” he pointed out. “And fat,” he added, then whuffled uncontrollably.

  “Oh…just…go back to sleep,” Toaff said, trying to sound bored and impatient but actually feeling a lot better now, about everything. When you whuffled at the same things, did other differences matter?

  Toaff was relieved to see that what awaited him in the morning was not the stiff body of a dead squirrel, but a bright-eyed, hungry Churrchurr, impatient to know “Will you? Will you show me how to leap? Like you do?”

  Of course Toaff agreed. How could he not like being admired? They ate quickly, then Toaff led the little squirrel across to the horse chestnut tree.

  “We’re better runners,” Nilf told him. “Chukchuks aren’t nearly as fast, everybody says.”

  “I got here first, didn’t I?”

  “But you never said where we were going so I had to follow you. Anyway, it’s easy to see why you’re slower,” Nilf said. “You lope, like a rabbit. You push off with your back paws together and land with your front paws together. Calumph-calumph, calumph-calumph. I’m not saying you’re slow, you’re just not…We use our legs one after the other, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. That’s what makes us faster.”

  Toaff tried running that way and it felt wrong. He practically stumbled, so he pretended he didn’t care. He had climbed up the chestnut trunk and then out onto a high branch before he looked back.

  The little red squirrel had stopped moving back where the branch began and sat huddled up as close to the trunk as he could get.

  Toaff ran back to where the little red squirrel crouched with all eighteen of his nails digging in. “What’s wrong?”

  “I—” Nilf began, but stopped to gulp in air. His wild eyes stared at Toaff and his voice got tiny. “It’s so high. Higher than my pines, and in my pines there are all these wide branches underneath. But this…”

  Toaff looked down and he saw, for the first time, how very far below the branches the ground was and how very narrow the bare branch ahead. “I know it’s safe,” he said. “Really.”

  Nilf shook his head.

  Toaff pointed out, “It’s safer when the branches are bare like this because you can see everything, and that means you can see which are the good branches. That’s why you fell, you know. You couldn’t see to choose a good branch.”

  “Don’t make me think about falling,” Nilf said.

  Toaff remembered how the little red body had gone tumbling through branches. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

  “But I want to!” Nilf cried.

  “Why?” Toaff asked. But he thought he knew. Afraid was a helpless, hopeless word, the mouse in the fox’s jaws. Afraid was a word that went on too long before it ended, sharp as a shriek.

  “So I can cross the drive without a machine squishing me,” Nilf answered.

  “Why do you want to cross the drive?”

  “So I can see if there’s a holly bush in those woods beyond your pasture.”

  “What difference would a holly bush make?” Toaff asked, but Nilf—again!—wasn’t listening.

  “And I want to, too, because you must feel like a bird when you do it. So let’s get going,” Nilf decided.

  He was certainly brave enough, Toaff thought as he led the little squirrel out to the end of the branch. There, he pointed out a branch on the first maple. “See it? And you want to land close enough to the trunk that the branch doesn’t sink under you.”

  “I’m not nearly as big and fat as you,” Nilf said.

  “You’re big enough,” Toaff promised him. “And if the branch sways down, and you can’t get a grip? You’ve already fallen once,” he reminded the red squirrel.

  “Unnhh,” Nilf said, and said no more, so Toaff thought that he had probably won that argument, at least. He knew he was right, too. About leaping, Toaff already knew a lot.

  “Watch,” he said. He gathered his legs under him and leaped out.

  It wasn’t much of a leap. Having landed easily on the branch he’d shown Nilf, Toaff ran up to another, from which to return with a longer, more satisfying leap. Back on the chestnut, he climbed down to where Nilf waited. “Now you,” he said. “You do it.”

  And Nilf did.

  Toaff believed that the little Churrchurr really was afraid and so, although it wasn’t a great distance and the landing was clumsy, Toaff was sincerely impressed. “Perfect!” he called, and jumped over to join Nilf.

  “It won’t be so easy when these trees grow leaves,” Nilf warned. “I came outside last spring and I’ve seen them.”

  “There are no leaves now,” Toaff pointed out. “Do you want me to go next?”

  “No,” Nilf decided. He took a deep breath. “I will.”

  When he stood behind the little squirrel and watched, Toaff saw why Churrchurrs didn’t jump well. Nilf used one leg after the other to push off, da-da-da-da, just as he did for running along the ground. Toaff used both of his back legs, together, push. He tried to explain this as they continued practicing, going across and back, from the maple to the chestnut back to the maple, over and over. But Nilf couldn’t seem to do it.

  “My legs don’t work that way,” he concluded, and because Toaff had been unable to run like a Churrchurr himself, Toaff didn’t argue. “The more you practice, the better you’ll be” was all he said.

  Nilf practiced until he was breathless with the constant overcoming of fear and the jumping; then he sat down on the chestnut branch and said, “Home.”

  Toaff led him back toward the broken pine.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, because by then he certainly was.

  “I meant my home,” Nilf said. “But I wouldn’t mind eating first.”r />
  Not much later, they sat on the broken branch below the entrance in the warmth of a midday sun, chewing. “Winter’s going,” Nilf observed. “Aren’t you glad?”

  “Winter’s beautiful,” Toaff said. He remembered the bare branches black against the snow. “And it’s exciting,” he added, thinking of winds fierce enough to break a pine in half. “And I’ve got stores. Enough, I think.”

  “Enough for you and whoever it is you’re sharing them with?”

  Toaff turned to stare at this odd little squirrel, with his pointy ears and wild eyes. “What do you mean, sharing? I’m not sharing. There’s just me.”

  “I mean there was less in your pile of stores when we came back than there was when we went out. Didn’t you notice? So someone must have taken some.” Nilf glanced briefly at Toaff.

  “I’ve got enough stores,” Toaff said again.

  Nilf told him, “No squirrel has enough stores unless he lives in the nest-barn.”

  “What’s the nest-barn?”

  “It’s the big red nest,” Nilf told him.

  “Oh.” A nest-barn? How many nests did humans need? “Do squirrels live there?” Toaff asked.

  “Not anymore but some used to. They always had plenty of food because of the cows. The humans feed the cows. You could stay inside all winter long if you wanted and it was always warm.”

  Cows? Toaff wondered, but he had a more important question. “Why used to?”

  “Cats,” Nilf said. “Two of them. Those nest-barn cats will hunt you down to eat and sometimes they hunt you down just to kill you. It was too dangerous.”

  “Do you know of anywhere really safe?” Toaff asked.

  “Not for a squirrel. Maybe for dogs and cats and humans there’s somewhere. It’s safer where hollies are, that’s all I know. But nothing’s really safe.”

  “My den is safe,” Toaff said. He wondered if the little Churrchurr might come back sometime. Grays and Churrchurrs might hate each other, but he and Nilf didn’t, did they?

  “I have to go,” Nilf said. “It’s beginning to feel wrong.” While they had been eating, the little squirrel had become more and more uneasy. He looked up and around, and he looked down and around. His paws danced on the stump. Now his tail curled over his back as if to protect him, now he held it out low and stiff. Nilf was so nervous, he was making Toaff nervous, too. “I’m going,” Nilf said, and without another word or a backward glance, he skittered down the pine trunk and ran—really fast—across to the chestnut to jump over to the first maple and then to the next and the next, before he leaped across the drive and disappeared into his own woods.