“Foresters!” exclaimed the boy, dragging his father to the arm chair by the fire and snuggling against his knees, for he scented a story.
“You see,” his father told him, “they bury so many nuts that they often forget where they put them, and these nuts that are planted that way grow into trees.”
“My!” exclaimed the boy, “wouldn’t a chipmunk be surprised if he knew he planted trees!”
“He doesn’t know it. It is just a part of Mother Nature’s wonderful plan for keeping this old world going.”
The children’s mother suddenly laughed. “What do you think I saw to-day?” she asked them. “Fuzzy-Wuzz curled up asleep under a tree and looking so much like a hump of earth that a chipmunk hopped off the trunk and landed square on his nose. I don’t know which was the more surprised, the cub or the chipmunk.”
CHAPTER XVI
FUZZY-WUZZ PLAYS FATE
FUZZY-WUZZ lay basking in the late September sunshine. The mountains had blossomed forth since the frost with patches of berries that gleamed handsomely against the evergreens.
He had followed the children to a sandy place among the granite ledges back of the cabin, where they found a colony of the giant black ants. The children had been having a lot of fun with these ants. First they laid a piece of leaf over the entrance to an ant hill. Promptly one of the inmates poked his head forth to see what had so suddenly shut off the light.
Seeing the leaf, he went back and got help, and about a dozen ants came out and took hold of one edge of the leaf, and pulled, while the first ant stood on the stem and directed operations. That way, they had their entrance clear again in no time.