THE FIRST NUT CROP
THAT year the nut crop was a failure. This was the off-year for the red
oaks; they bear only every other season. The white oaks had been nipped
by a late frost. The beech-trees were very scarce, and the chestnuts
were gone--the blight had taken them all. Pignut hickories were not
plentiful, and the very best of all, the sweet shag-hickory, had
suffered like the white oaks.
October, the time of the nut harvest, came. Dry leaves were drifting to
the ground, and occasional "thumps" told of big fat nuts that also were
falling, sometimes of themselves and sometimes cut by harvesters; for,
although no other Graysquirrel was to be seen, Bannertail was not
alone. A pair of Redsquirrels was there and half a dozen Chipmunks
searching about for the scattering precious nuts.
[Illustration]
Their methods were very different from those of the Graysquirrel race.
The Chipmunks were carrying off the prizes in their cheek-pouches to
underground storehouses. The Redsquirrels were hurrying away with their
loads to distant hollow trees, a day's gathering in one tree. The
Graysquirrels' way is different. With them each nut is buried in the
ground, three or four inches deep, one nut at each place. A very precise
essential instinct it is that regulates this plan. It is inwrought with
the very making of the Graysquirrel race. Yet in Bannertail it was
scarcely functioning at all. Even the strongest inherited habit needs a
starter.
How does a young chicken learn to peck? It has a strong inborn readiness
to do it, but we know that that impulse must be stimulated at first by
seeing the mother peck, or it will not function. In an incubator it is
necessary to have a sophisticated chicken as a leader, or the chickens
of the machine foster-mother will die, not knowing how to feed.
Nevertheless, the instinct is so strong that a trifle will arouse it to
take control. Yes, so small a trifle as tapping on the incubator floor
with a pencil-point will tear the flimsy veil, break the restraining
bond and set the life-preserving instinct free.
Like this chicken, robbed of its birthright by interfering man, was
Bannertail in his blind yielding to a vague desire to hide the nuts. He
had never seen it done, the example of the other nut-gatherers was not
helpful--was bewildering, indeed.
Confused between the inborn impulse and the outside stimulus of example,
Bannertail would seize a nut, strip off the husk, and hide it quickly
anywhere. Some nuts he would thrust under bits of brush or tufts of
grass; some he buried by dropping leaves and rubbish over them, and a
few, toward the end, he hid by digging a shallow hole. But the real,
well-directed, energetic instinct to hide nut after nut, burying them
three good inches, an arm's length, underground, was far from being
aroused, was even hindered by seeing the Redsquirrels and the Chipmunks
about him bearing away their stores, without attempting to bury them at
all.
So the poor, skimpy harvest was gathered. What was not carried off was
hidden by the trees themselves under a layer of dead and fallen leaves.
High above, in an old red oak, Bannertail found a place where a broken
limb had let the weather in, so the tree was rotted. Digging out the
soft wood left an ample cave, which he gnawed and garnished into a warm
and weather-proof home.
The bright, sharp days of autumn passed. The leaves were on the ground
throughout the woods in noisy dryness and lavish superabundance. The
summer birds had gone, and the Chipmunk, oversensitive to the crispness
of the mornings, had bowed sedately on November 1, had said his last
"good-by," and had gone to sleep. Thus one more voice was hushed, the
feeling of the woods was "_Hush, be still!_"--was all-expectant of some
new event, that the tentacles of high-strung wood-folk sensed and
appraised as sinister. Backward they shrank, to hide away and wait.
[Illustration]
_THE SUN SONG OF BANNERTAIL_