Meantime Peter and Rufina lived in the big cage on the wall outside my other window.
They never became friends. As I have said in my former book, by the time the latter had been a fortnight in the cage she was completely mistress of the situation. She appropriated Peter’s sleeping-box, she stole all his best nuts, and should he dare to approach her while she was eating, she routed him fiercely. He was thankful when the short winter day was over, and he could sneak behind the curtains in my room and snuggle into his blue serge sleeping-bag, remaining there till next morning.
I must explain that Peter was a little English squirrel, whom I had reared from babyhood. He was now about nine months old. Rufina was a lady, German, bought from Devon and Co. at Bethnal Green. At this time I had had her barely three months.
Squirrels hate a high wind. The noise in the trees makes it difficult, I suppose, to hear enemies about. Also perhaps they fear to lose their hold of the tossing branches. Be it as it may, I was always certain that in a gale not a glimpse of a squirrel would be obtained all day. Torrents of rain, too, will deter them from scampering about; their tails get bedraggled and heavy and upset their balance. I have known Fritz come in the rain, but it generally meant that the weather was going to clear. I have seen him out in a wild snow squall. He spent a quarter of an hour once on the roof of the garden squirrel-house trying to scratch his way in through the heather thatch where a rival lived, while the snow was falling so thickly I could scarcely see him.
Young squirrels are very playful, and I think they amuse themselves with toys.
I shall never forget my astonishment at one of Rufina’s achievements. There had been an empty mouse-trap in my room for some weeks. It was five or six inches long and two or three inches deep, made of wood, with a wire top. It was not baited, and I had carefully unset it in case Peter or Rufina playing about the room should put their noses inside and get nipped by the spring. The father of a mouse family had once been caught in it, and I had had some very miserable moments; but that is another story. Ever since that tragic night his widow and children had carefully avoided it. Still, it lay under a cupboard, forgotten. One day I was surprised to see it on the floor of the squirrel-house. I wondered if the housemaid had thrown it out, meaning to take it away, and had forgotten it. The evening, however, was closing in, and I left it alone, intending to remove it next day. Early the following morning I was awakened by extraordinary sounds in the cage, a bumping and a scrabbling quite unaccountable, punctuated every now and then by the fall of something on the floor. When I got up to look, I saw Rufina in the act of climbing up the wire netting with the trap in her mouth.
I watched her. She gave me a backward glance, as much as to say, “Don’t you interfere,” and recommenced her haulings and tuggings. She dragged the thing some four feet up, and then along a wooden bar till she got below the little platform outside the sleeping-box. Then she made a spring, but lost her hold of the trap, and down it came clattering to the floor. What could she want it for? It was no good as a receptacle for storing nuts, as the spring door was closed, and the wires were too closely set for it to be possible to push anything through them. I came to the conclusion that she meant to place it somewhere as a barrier to circumvent Peter.