MR. AND MRS. TREE MOUSE
Now as anyone understands who knows much about meadow mice, they nest on
the ground, and they are the one kind of game a bear can always count on
when the roots and berries are all gone and the trout streams frozen.
Once upon a time, ever and ever so many thousands of years ago, there
was a mouse who was wiser than the rest. When bears and bobcats pursued
her, she took refuge in the tree tops. One night it seemed as if every
creature in the woods was after her, and when she had reached the snug
crotch of a high limb where she could hide from them, she decided it was
wiser to stay there all night. The next morning for breakfast she
sampled the bark, and to her surprise, found the flavor first rate. Then
she began to ask herself why she need ever come down at all. She trilled
for her mate, for she had a sweet little birdlike voice when she sang,
and they discussed the situation. They had just been thinking of
building a nest where the babies would be safe when they came, and they
finally decided to build it away up high in the tree.
Those babies, after having grown up in the tree top, saw no reason why
they should go back to the ground either, and they too built homes in
the tree tops, so high that bears and bobcats never thought of looking
for them there. Where before they had eaten grass and other things that
they could find on the ground, now they nibbled bark and spruce fans,
and the tender butt ends of the pine needles. That way the whole tribe
came to live in trees. Their relatives who had stayed on the ground all
got caught, and there were only the families of those who had become
arboreal. Now their neighbors were birds and squirrels, and when they
wanted to go exploring, they could run out along one branch till it
crossed the branch of another tree. In time Mother Nature changed their
little furry coats from the gray-brown of the soil to the red-brown of
the Oregon tree trunks, so that their enemies could not see them when
they crouched along the limbs. She changed their teeth to stronger ones
that could gnaw the bark more easily, and she gave them the kind of eyes
that can see in the dark, because when the pretty little fellows went to
feeding among the greenery, their rufous coats showed up too plainly by
daylight. Finally, their Great Mother found that they needed longer
tails than they had on the ground to help them keep their balance when
they had to leap from branch to branch. And after Mother Nature had done
all that for them, they found that they were so safe that they could
build great, roomy nests in the very tree tops where they could raise
their children. Sometimes they found an abandoned squirrel’s nest that
made a first rate framework, and converted it into a palace of many
rooms. These they carpeted beautifully with cedar fans and bits of dry
moss and lichen for the babies to creep around on. The young bachelor
mice were generally satisfied with one-room cabins away out on the tips
of the limbs where they could come and go as they pleased, but as the
young people became more experienced in nest building, and as they found
that they needed larger quarters, they would often build a whole colony
of nests around some tree trunk, with the different apartments resting
on different branches, but with one main hallway that ran around the
trunk so that they could visit back and forth without going out of
doors. As the dust blew over these nests of sticks and spruce fans, and
the rain moistened the dust, and the seeds of tiny plants blew on this
rich soil, the apartment house would come to look like a bit of the
ground beneath, and on cold nights the thick walls would keep out the
rain and the wind and make it all as snug and homelike as anything you
can imagine.
That is how Mr. and Mrs. Tree Mouse came to be living so high above the
ground, in the branches of this great pine tree. They really preferred
spruce, because the bark has a better flavor, and, too, because most of
their friends lived in the spruce trees; but when Douglas, the squirrel,
had abandoned this great, roomy nest, it had seemed like too good a
bargain to let go, and they had promptly moved in.
They were really awfully frightened when they saw Chinook come
scrambling so near, for they had heard him tell Douglas how he would eat
him alive if he ever caught him. The pretty little red mother mouse had
just gotten her four babies asleep when Chinook finished his nap, and
with a yawn and a stretch, began looking about him to see where he was.
Now was the time for Father Tree Mouse to distract his attention, for
any moment, the cub might start investigating the nest. With a
high-pitched little squeak, the brave mite started to run along the limb
just below, but he scuttled so fast that Chinook decided it was no use
trying to catch him, and just sat there blinking sleepily in the
sunshine. At that, Father Tree Mouse came back, and this time he
pretended to have a broken leg, which made him limp along so slowly that
even Chinook might have caught him. Just barely out of reach of the
little bear’s barbed paw, Father Tree Mouse limped down the tree trunk
and out along the limb. This time the cub ran after him so fast that
Father Mouse’s heart thumped with terror. But he must get that bear
clear out of their tree, and at last he dropped to the ground and raced
madly across an open space to another tree, with Chinook close at his
heels. His ruse was working altogether too well, for the little bear all
but clapped his paw on him once. He did get the tip of his long tail.
But Father Tree Mouse remembered a knothole he had seen one day when out
exploring, and straight for that knothole he darted, tumbling into it
not an instant too soon. For a time Chinook watched the knothole for him
to come out, but by and by his mother called him, and when he came back,
Father Tree Mouse had left and gone back home.
“Do you know,” he told Mother Tree Mouse, “we ought to find some nice,
big knothole and move into it before that bear comes back.” And before
another night had passed, they had found one, and moved the babies.