THE NEW AND LONELY LIFE
THE break was made complete by the Red Horror, and the going of the
man-people. Fences and buildings are good for some things, but the tall
timber of the distant wooded hill was calling to him and though he came
back many a time to the garden while there yet was fruit, and to the
field while the corn was standing, he was ever more in the timber and
less in the open.
Food there was in abundance now, for it was early autumn; and who was to
be his guide in this: "What to eat, what to let alone?" These two guides
he had, and they proved enough: _instinct_, the wisdom inherited from
his forebears, and his keen, discriminating _nose_.
Scrambling up a rotten stub one day, a flake of bark fell off, and here
a-row were three white grubs; fat, rounded, juicy. It was instinct bade
him seize them, and it was smell that justified the order; then which,
it is hard to say, told him to reject the strong brown nippers at one
end of each prize. That day he learned to pry off flakes of bark for the
rich foodstuffs lodged behind.
[Illustration]
At another time, when he worked off a slab of bark in hopes of a meal,
he found only a long brown millipede. Its smell was earthy but strange,
its many legs and its warning feelers, uncanny. The smell-guide seemed
in doubt, but the inborn warden said: "Beware, touch it not." He hung
back watching askance, as the evil thing, distilling its strange
pestilent gas, wormed Snake-like out of sight, and Bannertail in a
moment had formed a habit that was of his race, and that lasted all his
life. Yea, longer, for he passed it on--this: Let the hundred-leggers
alone. Are they not of a fearsome poison race?
[Illustration]
Thus he grew daily in the ways of woodlore. He learned that the
gum-drops on the wounded bark of the black birch are good to eat, and
the little faded brown umbrella in the woods is the sign that it has a
white cucumber in its underground cellar; that the wild bees' nests have
honey in them, and grubs as good as honey; but beware, for the bee has a
sting! He learned that the little rag-bundle babies hanging from vine
and twig, contain some sort of a mushy shell-covered creature that is
amazingly good to eat; that the little green apples that grow on the
oaks are not acorns, and are yet toothsome morsels of the lighter sort,
while nearly every bush in the woods at autumn now had strings of
berries whose pulp was good to eat and whose single inside seed was as
sweet as any nut. Thus he was learning woodcraft, and grew and
prospered, for outside of sundry Redsquirrels and Chipmunks there were
few competitors for this generous giving of the Woods.
_THE FLUFFING OF HIS TAIL_