And do not drink in the blinding sunlight, which makes it hard to see if danger is near; then, too, it is that the Blacksnake crawls out to seek some basking place in the hottest sun.
Yes, this is Squirrel wisdom; the morning drink is at sunrise, the evening at sunset, when the cool shade is on the woods but darkness not begun.
The Graycoat family held together still, though the Harvest-moon was red in the low eastern sky. Some Squirrel families break up as soon as the young are nearly grown. But some there are that are held together longer, very long, by unseen bonds of sympathy with which they have been gifted in a little larger measure than is common. Brownhead was much away, living his own life. Still, he came home. Nyek-nyek, gentle, graceful Nyek-nyek, clung to her mother and the old nest, like a very weanling; and rest assured that in Squirrel-land, as in others, love is begotten and intensified by love.
The morning drink and the morning meal were the established daily routine. Then came a time of exercise and play. But all Squirrels that are hale and wise take a noonday nap.
Each was stretched on one or other of the sleeping platforms, lying lazily at ease one noontime. The day was very hot, and the sun swung round so it glared on Nyek-nyek's sleeping-porch. Panting soon with the heat, she decided to drink, swung to the gangway of their huge trunk and started down the tree. The little mother, ever alert, watched the young one go. There was in her heart just a shadow of doubt, of distrust, much as a human mother might feel if she saw her toddler venture forth alone into the night.
Nyek-nyek swung to the ground, coursed in billowy ripples of silver-gray along a log, stopped on a stump to look around and religiously fluff her tail, while mother dreamily watched through half-closed eyes. Then out into the brilliant sunlight she went. Some creatures are dazed and made lazy by the hot, bright glare, some find in it a stimulant, a multiplier of their life force; it sets their senses on a keener edge; it gifts them with new speed, intensifies their every power.
The Graycoats are of the first kind, and of the second was Coluber, the long, black, shiny, blue-black Snake that was lying like a limp and myriad-linked chain flung across a big, low log—a log that sucked the sun heat as it lay, just where the brook expanded to the pond. Never a blink was there in those gray-green eyes, never a quiver in that long, lithe tongue. One not knowing would have said he is dead; one knowing him well would have said he is filling up his storage-batteries to the full. Never a wriggle was there in even the nervous tail tip, that nearly always switches to and fro; yet not a move of the Squirrel since she left her sleeping porch was lost on him.
What was it gave a new pathway to the young Graycoat? Was it Mother Carey who led her with a purpose? Not to the familiar log she went, where the family had always found an ideal footing when they took the morning drink, but down-stream, toward the pond and on to the little muddy shore.
