“Indeed, you shan’t!” said Tommy Smith (and he was very angry). “I won’t take you there. You want to eat her eggs, I know; and I think you are a very naughty animal.”
The squirrel looked at Tommy Smith for a little while without speaking, and then he said, “You know, I never eat hen’s eggs.”
“Don’t you?” said Tommy Smith. It was all he could think of to say, for he remembered that he did eat hen’s eggs. Of course he knew that that was different—the peewit had told him that it was—but just at that moment he couldn’t think of why it was different, and he couldn’t help wishing that he hadn’t been quite so angry with the squirrel. “Perhaps you don’t eat too many eggs,” he said in a milder tone.
“Of course not,” said the squirrel. “Wherever there are plenty of squirrels, there are plenty of birds too, as long as people with guns don’t shoot them. That shows that we don’t eat too many. And then, as for our killing trees”—
“Oh, but do you kill trees?” said Tommy Smith. “I didn’t know that you did that.”
“Why, sometimes when we are very hungry,” said the squirrel, “we gnaw the bark all round the trunk of a small tree, and then it dies. So those people who are always finding out reasons for killing animals say we do harm to the forests. But I can tell them this, that no forest was ever cut down by the squirrels that lived in it. Men cut down the forests, and shoot the birds and the squirrels; but if they left them all three alone, they would all get on very well together. Once, you know, almost the whole of England was covered with forests. Do you think it was the squirrels who cut them all down?”
“Oh no,” said Tommy Smith. “It was men with axes, I should think.”
“Yes,” said the squirrel. “It is that great axe of theirs that does the mischief, not these poor little teeth of mine. It is axes, not squirrels, that they should keep out of the woods.”
Tommy Smith thought the squirrel might be right, but he wanted to hear something more about what he did and the way he lived, so he said, “Oh, Mr. Squirrel, you haven’t told me where you hide the nuts and acorns that you eat when you wake up in the winter.”