For several weeks the smell of wood smoke had come from the South. It was that warning smoke that had kept the Ranger ready at a moment’s notice from the fire lookouts to summon a hundred helpers from the lumber camp to cut a fire trench, for in the drier woods of California raged fearful forest fires.
About that time the cubs began to notice that their woods were being visited by a number of furred and feathered folk who did not belong there. Foxes slunk along the shadows as if aware that they were in unknown territory. A prickly porcupine family, a mother and four children, came lumbering, fearless and unafraid in their protecting spines. A black and white striped skunk and her five kittens came soon after, leaving tiny bearlike footprints, and when one of the young foxes would have pounced on the littlest kitten, the kitten turned its back and raised its plumy tail, and stamped its feet angrily, and the mother fox signalled for her son to run fast, or something terrible would happen. The skunks also were completely unafraid.
Birds flew in increasing numbers through the tree tops, a few deer came feeding in a famished manner on the ferns and bracken, and any number of brown little cottontails came gnawing hungrily at every bit of green stuff they could reach without being caught. Douglas the squirrel watched from his tree top in amazement. For it was the squirrels who came in greatest numbers—gray squirrels and red squirrels and little striped chipmunks. These fairly swarmed through the tree tops, while the smoke yellowed the stifling air and the sun glowed red all day long. The woods in which they had had their homes had burned, and while the wind for the most part came from the sea and blew the smoke eastward, the more experienced of the four-footed folk knew that the way to escape was neither to go with the wind nor against it, but at right angles to the march of the flames.
Douglas, who had come to feel that he owned the woods around Mother Brown Bear’s den, swore and scolded and barked insults at the refugees, but it didn’t do him a particle of good. The best he could do was to hold his own particular spruce tree from their onslaught. The rich, nut-filled spruce cones and the great, heavy yellow pine cones on which he had feasted fat all summer, and all the huge stores of these good things that he had hidden in every hollow log and cranny of the rocks—all these riches that would have lasted him for years if left undisturbed were being appropriated by the starving hordes whose own stores had been burned.
If the cubs hadn’t been so fond of nuts themselves that they really preferred them to squirrel meat, they would have had a great time that summer, for some of the younger squirrels were not a bit cautious.
“What are all you folks coming here for, anyway?” Douglas demanded, as an old gray squirrel came running along his favorite limb.
“For something to eat,” answered the old fellow wearily, cutting off a spruce cone and turning it rapidly in his paws as he cut one scale after another to lay bare the nut. “Personally, I mean to keep on till I find a certain grove of lodgepole pines that I happen to know about.”
“Why, are they better than these?” Douglas demanded impudently.
“The nuts are no better, perhaps, but there are sure to be more of them. I’ve traveled many a weary mile since my youth, for my family has been driven by fire, or drouth and poor nut crops, to one grove after another; but never yet have I known a lodgepole not to be full of nuts; for if one year’s crop has failed, there are still the crops of past years clinging to the branches. No, sir! I never knew a grove of lodgepole pines where there weren’t nuts in abundance.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you move into one long ago?” Douglas was still rude.