BANNERTAIL was now in fresh midsummer coat of sleekest gray. His tail was a silver plume, and bigger than himself. His health was perfect. And just so surely as a sick one longs to be and to stay at home, so a lusty Squirrel hankers to go a-roaming.
Swinging from tree to tree, leaping the familiar jump-ways, he left the family one early morning, drank deeply at the spring brook, went on aground "hoppity-hop" for a dozen hops, then stopped to look around and frisk his tail. Then on, and again a look around. So he left the hickory woods, and swung a mile away, till at last he was on the far hillside where first he met the Redhead.
High in a tasselled pine he climbed and sat, and his fine nose took in the pleasant gum smells with the zest that came from their strangeness as much as from their sweetness.
As he sat he heard a rustling, racketty little noise in the thicket near. Flattening to the bough and tightening in his tail he watched. What should appear but his old enemy, the Redhead, dragging, struggling with something on the ground, stopping to sputter out his energetic, angry "Snick, snick," as the thing he dragged caught in roots and twigs. Bannertail lay very low and watched intently. The Redsquirrel fussed and worked with his burden, now close at hand. Bannertail saw that it was a flat, round thing, like an acorn-cup, only many times larger, and reddish, with a big, thick stem on the wrong side—a stem that was white, like new-peeled wood.
Bannertail had seen such growing in the woods, once or twice; little ones they were, but his nose and his inner guide had said: "Let them alone." And here was this fiery little Redsquirrel dragging one off as though he had a prize! Sometimes he lifted it bodily and made good headway, sometimes it dragged and caught in the growing twigs. At last it got fixed between two, and with the energy and fury that so often go with red hair, the Redhead jerked, shoved, and heaved, and the brittle, red-topped toadstool broke in two or three crisp pieces. As he sputtered and Squirrel-cussed, there was a warning Bluejay note. Redhead ran up the nearest tree; as it happened, the one in which was Bannertail, and in an instant the enemies were face to face. "Scold and fight" is the Redsquirrel's first impulse, but when Bannertail rose up to full height and spread his wondrous tail the Red one was appalled. He knew his foe again; his keen, discriminating nose got proofs of that. The memory of defeat was with him yet. He retreated, snick-sputtering, and finally went wholly out of sight.
When all was still, Bannertail made his way to the broken mushroom; rosy red and beautiful its cap, snowy white its stem and its crisp, juicy flesh.
But of this he took no count. The smelling of it was his great chemic test. It had the quaint, earthy odor of the little ones he had seen before, and yet a pungent, food-like smell, like butternuts, indeed, with the sharp pepper tang of the rind a little strong, and a whiff, too, of the many-legged crawling things that he had learned to shun. Still, it was alluring as food. And now was a crucial time, a veritable trail fork. Had Bannertail been fed and full, the tiny little sense of repulsion would have turned the scale, would have reasserted and strengthened the first true verdict of his guides—"Bad, let it alone." But it had an attractive nut-like aroma that was sweetly appetizing, that set his mouth a-watering; and this thing turned the scale—he was hungry.
