Toaff's Way Read online

  But when Toaff stood in the grass under his tree, the food was gone. All of it.

  Missus didn’t reappear for many days after that. During that time the flowers-or-blossoms had fallen off their branches, drifting down onto the grass to lie there, quiet as snow, until gentle breezes gradually blew them away. Bright green leaves uncurled on the apple trees. Day after day, night after night, the air warmed. The days grew longer, too, and the nights shorter.

  But when Toaff squeezed out of his den one morning to forage, there Missus was. She stood in the same entrance and once more pieces of white food flew out from her front legs. Before she had finished, the crows were flying at her, kaah-kaahing, and when she had gone back into her nest-house, the crows landed.

  That was when Toaff saw it. A solitary gray squirrel was approaching from around the far corner. A gray squirrel! His heart danced at the sight. It was a gray squirrel, who might have come from those trees beyond, so he jumped up from his perch to scramble down the trunk and dash across the grass to greet it. Sharp kaah-kaahs stopped him, maybe saying Go away! Or Mine! Toaff couldn’t understand crows, so they could just as easily have been greeting the squirrel, asking, What took you so long? The crows flew noisily off, and at that moment two cats came creeping along his side of the nest-house, where the other Gray couldn’t see them.

  Toaff chuk-chukked a warning, screeching, “Cats! Run! Cats!”

  Without even looking to see who had sounded the alarm, the other squirrel spun around and fled.

  Their prey lost, both cats sat in the grass in front of the nest-house entrance. They licked their paws, slowly and carefully, over and over. They didn’t eat the food. They didn’t even smell it. They just sat on food some other animal could have had if they hadn’t been there. They just sat and rubbed at their ears and licked their paws, waiting, and Toaff had a sudden, unexpected, unpleasant idea: Did the kaah-kaahs tell the cats that squirrels would be out foraging?

  The next time Missus stepped into the entrance to scatter food, two crows flew noisily at her and Toaff stayed away. He watched. Maybe the crows were greeting her, or driving her back inside, maybe they were telling any nearby squirrel there was food, or maybe they were announcing to the cats that a squirrel would appear. He needed to know what was going on before he ran out across the grass, beyond shelter. That day, no cats appeared and no squirrels either, and the crows ate everything. The time after that, however, not one crow was around to kaah-kaah the news to the cats, if that was what they did. So Toaff scurried down, to forage.

  He found fat chunks of the soft, satisfying food waiting in the grass. He had time to gobble one down, sitting up on his haunches, looking all around while he chewed hurriedly, and he had just picked up another when he saw the gray squirrel, rounding the corner of the nest-house, and was there another squirrel, too?

  Because he was watching the squirrel, Toaff didn’t see the cat. In fact, the first warning he had of it was the sudden cry of a squirrel. “Cat!” it chukked, but not to warn Toaff. It was calling back over its shoulder as it wheeled around. “Cat! Let’s go!” and it disappeared from sight.

  Toaff had no chance of making it back to his apple tree. The cat was approaching from that same direction. It would easily cut him off. And finish him off.

  Just behind him was the entrance that Missus came out of. Toaff dropped the food and jumped, up, up one flat piece of wood and then again, up another. At the top he ran into a solid wall.

  How had Missus gone into her nest through a solid wall?

  He had no time to wonder about that, and besides, who knew what humans could do? He leaped, landed hard, and ran, ran fast, to get away from the cat. He followed that other squirrel, racing alongside the nest-house and around the corner, and there were trees! Trees close by! Toaff raced up the trunk of the first tree he came to. This was a maple, not that that mattered, although for some reason it made him feel a little less panicky to be back in a maple tree. At a high branch he stopped, his heart thumping, to look back.

  The cat was already climbing up the trunk, moving fast. Toaff scrambled higher. Squirrels climb more nimbly than cats, so he wasn’t too worried about being caught. Without deciding—because he had already decided it as soon as he rounded the corner and saw three tall trees—Toaff ran along a branch and leaped across to the next tree. This was also a maple, and when he looked back a second time, what he saw came as a pleasant surprise.

  Cats might be sleek and fast on the ground, and yes, they were good climbers, but they couldn’t leap from one tree to the next, and getting down a tree trunk was difficult for a cat. Toaff saw the cat now climbing backward down the maple trunk, one stiff, clumsy, anxious step after another. It was digging its claws into the trunk and its tail dragged on the bark and Toaff whuffled at the sight.

  The cat heard him, of course. It was still well above the ground, but it stopped to glare at the squirrel who got away. It glared and hissed softly, then returned to the work of clambering down. Once on the grass, it looked up at Toaff, who was watching from his safe perch. The cat’s long tail waved back and forth, slowly. “I’ll remember you,” it hissed.

  Toaff had never been hissed at before. Hissing made the words hard to understand. “What?” he asked. “What did you say?”

  “You don’t think you can snark at a cat, do you?” hissed the big white animal, but more slowly so that Toaff did understand. He didn’t feel like whuffling now. He backed up. The leaves on the maple were new and small but they might protect him from the hissing cat.

  “I’m Fox,” the cat hissed after him, and it wasn’t until Toaff was safely on the opposite side of the tree’s trunk, huddled up against a sturdy branch, that he thought to wonder: Why would a cat be called Fox? The cat hissed, “I’m Fox, and sooner or later, probably sooner, you’re going to make me a good dinner.”

  Toaff peered around to see that the cat had seated himself next to the nest-house. His blue eyes were fixed on him. The tail stroked back and forth along the grass.

  Cats were patient, Toaff knew. Squirrels were not, and he was a squirrel. Already he could feel panic quivering in his paws, a panic that made him want to dash and hope, dash down the trunk and back to the apple trees, hoping with every bound that the cat wouldn’t get him. He forced himself to stay still, even though anxious questions—What will I eat? and Where will I sleep? and When will he go away?—raced around and around inside his head, circling faster and faster, crying in sharper and louder voices. Toaff dug his nails into the branch and stayed right where he was.

  It was a long time before Toaff moved at all and that was just to hide himself farther along the maple branch, deeper among its small leaves. That was when he saw that the third tree was an oak. Oaks, Toaff had heard often enough, meant acorns in the fall. In the fall any squirrel who found himself living near an oak was in luck for the winter.

  But it was spring now and Fox was still waiting. His tail still swept back and forth, back and forth. Toaff began thinking about the stores in his little den back in the apple tree. How long could the cat sit there? Just waiting. Too long, much too long. The jittery feeling moved all the way up his legs and he had to move. He leaped across to the oak, and when he looked down again, Fox had left, and Toaff, lighthearted with relief, leaped back to the first maple. He felt as weightless as wind and as strong as any tree and he made up his mind. There were squirrels somewhere on this side of the nest-house and he was a squirrel who had just escaped from a cat: He would stay here. With two maples and an oak, there was bound to be somewhere for a squirrel to live. For the first time, he looked up. He glimpsed a large and untidy nest, like a small and rather dirty cloud trapped in the high branches of the maple closest to the nest-house.

  What kind of a bird would build a nest so badly?

  Something round appeared at the untidy edge of the nest above him.

  It was the head of a squirrel. It was
the round head of a gray squirrel. A second head joined the first, and then a third.

  Toaff didn’t know what to think.

  “That was some good jumping,” one said.

  “We saw you before,” another added. “Your tail is so silver, and didn’t you warn me once?”

  By then, Toaff did know what he ought to think. “Is that a drey?” he asked.

  “Do we live in it?” the third asked, then, “Are we squirrels?” and finally, “How stupid are you?”

  “Come on up,” the first two heads chukked. “There’s lots of room.”

  When Toaff tumbled into the drey, three squirrels waited there, sitting in a row.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “You got away from Fox,” said the smallest one in an admiring voice.

  Toaff didn’t want to boast. “I was lucky.”

  “Did you hear that?” she asked the other two.

  What was there to hear? Toaff wondered as he told them, “I’m Toaff.”

  “You made Fox really angry,” said the squirrel in the middle. He had a long white scar running from his neck down over his shoulder to his belly.

  Toaff couldn’t help staring at the scar. He told himself it wasn’t smart to ask a squirrel who hadn’t even told you his name how he got his scar. In any case, “There’s nothing special about making Fox angry, Tzaaf,” said the third squirrel, who was the largest. “Fox hates not getting what he wants.”

  “I know that,” Tzaaf answered.

  The first squirrel ignored the quarreling. “I’m Mroof,” she said. Her pale gray tail waved gently behind her. She was the softest-looking creature Toaff had ever seen, with fur the color of the clouds that carry friendly little spring rains. She reminded him of Soaff. “And that’s Tzaaf and that’s Pneef. Don’t mind her.”

  “Hello,” Toaff said again. He saw how large the drey was, to give squirrels plenty of room for play, and how high its woven walls rose, to keep squirrels out of bad weather, and how thick were the branches above, to protect squirrels from flying predators. “How many of you live here?” he asked.

  “Three,” Mroof answered. “Do you want to stay?”

  It might have been big but Toaff didn’t see any stores, so he decided, “I have my own nest.”

  As he was saying that, Pneef was protesting, “Mroof! You can’t invite just anybody!”

  “Where is it?” Tzaaf asked. “It must be somewhere near because I’ve seen you. You warned me about the cat, didn’t you?”

  “It’s in the apple tree. I was watching from there.”

  “I suppose you’ll tell everybody about our drey, now you’ve seen it,” Pneef decided. “He will,” she assured the others, and predicted, “And they’ll all come here to live. The humans won’t like that.”

  Why was Pneef so unfriendly? That was another reason not to stay. “There isn’t any everybody,” Toaff said. “And I like my tree. It had flowers all over it, for days and days. Or maybe they were blossoms,” he added.

  “They were blossoms,” Pneef told him, sounding just like Braff, as if she knew everything and he didn’t know anything. “Why isn’t there any everybody?” she demanded. “I told you there was something funny about him,” she said to Tzaaf and Mroof.

  Mroof disagreed. “Squirrels can live alone,” she said. “Don’t you remember? The rest told us that before they left last fall, before we went into the nest-house for the winter after Tzaaf got better. So there’s nothing wrong with there being just one squirrel in a nest.”

  Especially my nest, Toaff thought, unable to imagine what it might be like to try to squeeze even a mouse into that tiny den.

  Mroof explained it to him. “Pneef is just being careful. She’s always careful.”

  “I’d still like to hear why he’s alone,” Pneef insisted. “Unless you have something to hide?” she asked Toaff.

  “I don’t,” Toaff said. “My other den was big, bigger than this drey. I think our nest in that den was as big as this whole drey, and there was another nest, just as big, to fit in all the other squirrels, and there was still room for piles of stores so that when everything was covered with snow, or if there was a storm, or even in early spring, we would all have enough. There were two mothers and two litters, and some adult males. I had two littermates. We were older than the other ones.”

  “Where are they all now?” Pneef asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe behind the nest-barn.”

  “The nest-barn is all the way around the corner. Past the garden,” Pneef told him. “We don’t go there. There’s nothing useful about the nest-barn.”

  “Then why do the humans have it?” wondered Toaff, who was tired of being told things.

  “They’ll have a reason,” she answered quickly. “It will be a good reason.”

  “Like there’s a reason for the cats,” Mroof said, “which is to keep mice out of the nest-house. Humans don’t like mice.”

  Not to be outdone, Tzaaf added, “And the reason for dogs is to keep out raccoons.”

  “But the humans don’t let the dogs hunt squirrels,” Mroof said.

  Tzaaf wasn’t sure about that. “You can’t tell what dogs will do. Especially Angus.”

  “Dogs don’t eat squirrels,” Pneef announced.

  “They might if they were hungry,” Tzaaf argued.

  Toaff was glad to hear that someone else didn’t always agree with Pneef.

  “That’s why the humans feed them,” Pneef said.

  “Then why do they chase us?” Tzaaf asked. “Especially that Sadie.”

  Toaff had an idea about that, but he kept it to himself. He didn’t know if these squirrels liked to hear new ideas.

  Mroof ignored this little quarrel to explain, “The dogs keep us safe from the raccoons, who would hunt us, if it wasn’t for the dogs.”

  “What do raccoons look like?” Toaff asked her. She seemed friendlier than the other two.

  “You’ll know them when you see them,” Pneef predicted.

  “They don’t come near our trees,” Mroof promised. “We’re the Lucky Ones about raccoons, just like about everything else. And I think Toaff’s a Lucky One, too,” she told Pneef and Tzaaf. Then she whuffled. “Did you hear that? One two.”

  Everyone except Toaff whuffled with her, and Tzaaf added, “If he is, he’d be one four,” which set them off again. Toaff sat there, thinking that maybe he wanted to leave. Maybe he would do that, even if this drey was so large and safe, even if he didn’t really want to return to his cramped den in the apple tree. Even if he had just realized that he was tired of being just one squirrel, alone. To be an only alone was different from being an only among others. So he waited a little longer, to see what would happen next if he stayed.

  Next Mroof asked him, “Why aren’t you still living with all of those others?” She sounded as if she was curious to hear, not curious to find out something wrong with him, so Toaff answered.

  “Our den was in the hollow center of a dead pine. One night last winter, in that really big storm—do you remember that really big one?”

  “We were inside all winter,” Tzaaf said, and he said it proudly.

  “Inside?” Toaff asked. “With the humans? In the nest-house?”

  “At the very top, right under its top.”

  “We found it ourselves and we stayed,” Pneef added.

  “Humans want us to be safe in winter weather,” Mroof said.

  Toaff looked through the branches and leaves at the dark, slanted cover of the nest-house. No storm would break that nest-house in half, or blow snow into it. “You are lucky,” he said.

  “We told you,” Pneef told him.

  “Our tree was broken by that storm,” Toaff said. “When I woke up in the morning, the others had all gone away. I didn’t know where they were.”

  �
��Why didn’t they take you with them, then?” asked Pneef.

  This was the first time Toaff had remembered that night. Squirrels have to remember what’s important, like where to forage and how to get back to the nest and what’s dangerous. They remember stories, too, but for another reason. Unimportant things—every single place they buried food last fall, for example, or who said what mean thing to them, or even things they wish hadn’t happened—those, they mostly forget right away. Toaff said, “I expect they didn’t see me. Or maybe they thought I was dead? I remember everything being dark and loud all around me and then I wasn’t awake anymore and in the morning they were all gone. The den had turned upside down and the stores were scattered everywhere. So I made a new nest and piled up the stores again. Why would I leave?”

  “If that’s true,” Pneef insisted, “why did you tell us they might be living behind the nest-barn?”

  “One of my littermates came back for stores and he told me. He said I could go with him, but I didn’t want to.”

  “If there was so much food there, why did you leave that den?” asked Pneef.

  If it had been Braff who kept asking these questions, as if Toaff was saying something that wasn’t true, Toaff would have stuck his nose right under his littermate’s front leg and snuffled until it turned into a wrestling-snuffling-whuffling match. But this was Pneef and he didn’t know how to convince her he wasn’t making anything up. He wanted to convince her because remembering the big den in the dead pine made him want to sleep again in a pile of warm squirrel bodies, at least for one night. So he explained.

  “When all the snow had melted, the human came and cut my broken tree up into pieces. With a chain saw. The dogs were there, too.”

  “That was a lawn mower,” Tzaaf told him. “He uses a lawn mower to cut things.”

  Then Pneef asked, “Why didn’t you go to find the others, if you knew where they were?”