Besides, had Fritz been her father, she would not have disappeared from the wood. Young squirrels remain with their parents, I am told, for a year. Fritz had been assiduous in his attentions to a very charming squirrel with a lovely tail, whom for some time I had called Mrs. Fritz, but she too vanished in September 1913 and left him master of the wood.
He became very lonely. It was poor fun to be cock of the walk when there was none to dispute his sway. Consequently, during the autumn, he took to visiting Wych Hill, Hurstgate, and Allen House, where the owners, also admirers of squirrels, were in the habit of hanging out cocoanuts and other dainties to attract them.
It has always been a mystery to me how he contrived to get to these plantations across the heath without being seen. To reach them he had to cross two wide public roads bristling with motor cars, bicycles, errand boys, and dogs. Besides crossing these dangerous zones, he must (unless he went a circuitous route by fir trees, quite a mile round) have traversed an open gorsy heath. Had he his little runs, I wondered, as rabbits have? And how dangerous, with watchful cats and lynx-eyed terriers about! As long as he could keep to the trees he was safe from the latter, but there was no consecutive belt of trees from our place to those I have mentioned. That he arrived there, there was no doubt, for I sometimes found him there myself, and he would come running down the pine trees at my call. Neighbours told me of his fugitive appearances in their gardens: “A large, red squirrel, very strong and active.”
Occasionally he stayed away from us altogether for a week or ten days. Sometimes the food which was placed for him would not be touched, at others it disappeared at midday, showing that he had slept away and come over for it somewhere between eleven and twelve o’clock. When a longer time than usual elapsed without a trace of him in wood or garden, I was perfectly miserable, thinking that the dear, bright-eyed, clever little thing had at last fallen a victim to boys or dogs. And then the joy of his reappearance at my window, as intimate and cocky as ever!
I remember one morning in particular, a soft, sunny, spring-like day in winter, I came into my room to find him, after an absence of more than a fortnight, very hungry and very pleased with himself. He cocked his tail on one side with a rakish air, and pranced over the carpet and up the curtains, in the way he used to do when courting Bunty a year ago, and showed, with all his little squirrel nature, his affection and pleasure at our meeting again. I stuffed him with every dainty I had till he could eat no more, and insisted on hiding the rest in the ivy on the wall, where, as I knew, mice would steal it when night came.