THE COLD SLEEP
NEXT day there was a driving storm of snow, and whether the sun came up
or not Bannertail did not know. He kept his nest, and, falling back on
an ancient spend-time of the folk he kins with, he curled up into a
sleep that deepened with the cold. This is partly a deliberate sleep.
The animal voluntarily lets go, knowing that life outside is
unattractive; he, by an act of the will, induces the cold sleep, that is
like a chapter of forgetfulness, with neither hunger nor desire, and
after it is over, no pain in punishment or remorse.
For two days the storm raged, and when the white flakes ceased to pile
upon the hills and trees, a cutting blast arose that sent snow-horses
riding across the fields and piled them up in drifts along the fences.
It made life harder for the Squirrel-Folk by hiding good Mother Earth
from their hungry eyes; but in one way the wind served them, for it
swept the snow from all the limbs that served the tree-folk as an
over-way.
For two days the blizzard hissed. The third day it was very cold; on the
fourth day Bannertail peeped forth on the changed white world. The wind,
the pest of wild life in the trees, had ceased, the sky was clear, and
the sun was shining in a weak, uncertain way. It evoked no enthusiasm in
the Graycoat's soul. Not once did he utter his Sun-salute. He was stiff
and sleepy, and a little hungry as he went forth. His hunger grew with
the exercise of moving. Had he been capable of such thought he might
have said: "Thank goodness the wind has swept the snow from the
branches." He galloped and bounded from one high over-way to another,
till a wide gap between tree-tops compelled him to descend. Over the
broad forest floor of shining white he leaped, and made for the beloved
hickory grove. Pine-cones furnish food, so do buds of elm and
flower-buds of maple. Red acorns are bitter yet eatable, white acorns
still better, and chestnuts and beechnuts delicious, but the crowning
glory of a chosen feast is nuts of the big shag hickory--so hard of
shell that only the strongest chisel teeth can reach them, so precious
that nature locks them up in a strong-box of stone, enwrapped in a
sole-leather case; so sought after, that none of them escape the hungry
creatures of the wood for winter use, except such as they themselves
have hidden for just such times. Bannertail quartered the surface of the
snow among the silent bare-limbed trees, sniffing, sniffing, alert for
the faintest whiff.
A hound would not have found it--his nose is trained for other game.
Bannertail stopped, swung his keen "divining-rod," advanced a few hops,
moved this way and that, then at the point of the most alluring whiff,
he began to dig down, down through the snow.
[Illustration]
Soon he was out of sight, for here the drift was nearly two feet deep.
But he kept on, then his busy hind feet replacing the front ones as
diggers for a time, sent flying out on the white surface brown leaves,
then black loam. Nothing showed but his tail and little jets of
leaf-mould. His whole arm's-length into the frosty ground did he dig,
allured by an ever-growing rich aroma. At last he seized and dragged
forth in his teeth a big fat hickory-nut, one buried by himself last
fall, and, bounding with rippling tail up a tree to a safe perch that
was man-high from the ground, he sawed the shell adroitly and feasted on
the choicest food that is known to the Squirrel kind.
A second prowl and treasure-hunt produced another nut, a third produced
an acorn, a visit to the familiar ever-unfrozen spring quenched his
thirst, and then back he undulated through the woods and over the snow
to his cosey castle in the oak.
_THE BALKING OF FIRE-EYES_