THE HOME IN THE SQUIRREL’S NEST
Douglas, the squirrel, whose fur just matched the red-brown tree trunks,
was as saucy as his eastern cousins, the red squirrels. He had been
named after a famous explorer, just as Chinook was named for the Indians
who lived in that part of Oregon.
It used to seem to the little bear as if the squirrel took delight in
teasing him, while so surely as Chinook tried to slip away and hide from
his mother, Douglas was sure to spy out his hiding place from some
branch overhead, and chatter and scream about it for all the woods to
hear. Then with a “catch-me-if-you-can” sort of challenge, he would go
whisking almost under the cub’s nose, and away. Chinook would go racing
after him, for he, as well as Douglas, could climb trees as easily as a
cat. His sharp claws clung to the bark even better than Mother Brown
Bear’s. But always the squirrel was too quick for him. Then when the
little bear would give it up and back his way to the ground, Douglas
would come and perch on a limb just out of reach, and hurl saucy threats
at him, or race up and down and around the tree trunk, his tail jerking
with his wrath. “These are _my_ woods,” he was always asserting. “My
pine cones! My mushrooms! Go away!” At which Chinook would retort: “I’ll
eat you alive, if you don’t look out!”
Then Douglas would seat himself away out on some slender branch where
Chinook could not have reached him, had he tried, and taking a pine cone
up in his handlike paws, he would nibble it around and around, and eat
the delicious kernels, while the little bear’s mouth watered for a
taste, then throw the empty cone down on his head.
The day after their fishing trip, Mother Brown Bear decided that if
Cougar was anywhere about, they had better stay at home, where in an
emergency she could order the cubs into the den and stand guard over
them. Chinook, having nothing better to do, therefore decided to catch
Douglas if it were possible for him to do so.
Away up in the yellow pine above the den was a great mass of sticks and
moss and dried pine needles that looked as if it might be Douglas’ nest.
In fact, he had often seen the squirrel run into that very tree. He did
not know that Douglas and his family had just built a larger nest in a
taller tree, for a bear’s little eyes are not so good as his nose for
telling what is going on about him. Today, sure enough, Douglas ran up
the trunk of the yellow pine with his cheeks stuffed full of mushroom
that he meant to put away for a rainy day. Chinook scrambled after him.
But Douglas, instead of going to the nest, only leapt to the limb of the
neighboring spruce, and from it to a tree beyond. Chinook determined, so
long as he was up there, to have a look at the nest.
Now it happened that Mrs. Rufus Tree Mouse had moved into the nest that
Douglas had abandoned. The little red mouse peered with frightened eyes
at the advancing cub, then with a soft “hush!” to her babies, she
cuddled them up in a warm ball away inside in the innermost chamber of
her new house, and waited, trembling, to see what the cub would do.
Chinook, finding the nest apparently deserted, though alluring, mousy
odors clung to it, decided to curl up in the crotch of a limb where he
could see if Douglas came back, and so comfortably was he lodged in the
hammocking crevice, and so drowsy did the stillness of the noonday
warmth make him feel, that the first thing Mrs. Rufus knew, the little
bear was fast asleep, right there, as it were, in her front yard.
“Dear me,” she whispered to Father Tree Mouse, when he came home with a
mouthful of soft lichen for the nursery walls. “Here is that bear cub,
right where he can see us if we so much as peek from the door, and there
is nothing to prevent his tearing the nest to pieces and eating us all
alive.”
“I haven’t forgotten how to run,” soothed Father Tree Mouse.
“Nor I. But what about the babies? We could only take two of them with
us. We’d have to leave two behind.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” explained Father Tree Mouse, “Don’t worry!
The minute that monster wakes, I’ll run out along that lower limb in
plain sight, and he’ll be so eager to catch me that he’ll never look
your way.”
“All right, then you keep watch while I feed the babies and get them to
sleep. If they keep squealing this way, they’ll wake him, sure,” and the
little red mouse began nursing her mouselets as a cat does her kittens.
She was thinking, what a shame to have to move, just as they had lined
walls and floor so daintily. The squirrel family had laid a good, firm
foundation of sticks too large for a mouse to handle, and the roof was
as tight and dry as new by the time they had plastered it. From their
post away up among the high interlacing branches, they could run from
one tree to the next and need never go down to the ground at all if they
didn’t want to, for they could find all the pine twig bark and—on the
tree next door, all the nice, green spruce needles that they could eat.
Father Tree Mouse had been sleeping in a little shack of his own, out on
the end of the branch, ever since the babies had come, from there he
could see all that went on around them, and put his mate on her guard by
sounding a signal squeak.
Chinook stirred in his sleep, and the little mother trembled. Would
Father Tree Mouse be able to do as he had planned when that monstrous
cub awoke?