“How come you’re here ...?” Bambi asked.
The cheerful, little face in front of him took on a worried expression. “The oak tree is gone ...” the squirrel began to complain, “my lovely old oak tree ... do you remember? It’s terrible ... He’s cut it down.”
Bambi lowered his head in sadness. It really did hurt his soul to hear about the wonderful ancient tree.
“It all happened so quickly,” the squirrel told him. “All of us who lived on the old tree, we all ran away and we could only watch as He bit through it with an enormous blinking tooth. The tree screamed out loud from his wound. He just kept on screaming, and the tooth screamed too ... it was horrible to hear it. Then that poor, lovely tree fell over. Out onto the meadow ... it made all of us cry.”
Bambi was silent.
“Yes ...” said the squirrel with a sigh, “He can do anything ... He’s omnipotent ...” He looked at Bambi with eyes wide open and pricked up his ears, but Bambi was silent.
“We’ve all got nowhere to live now ...” the squirrel continued, “I don’t even have any idea of where the others have got to ... I came over here ... but it’ll take me ages to find another tree like that.”
“The old oak tree ...,” muttered Bambi to himself, “I’ve known it since I was a child.”
“No ... but it’s good to see that it’s really you!” The squirrel became quite contented. “We all thought you must have died a long time ago. But there were some who said you were still alive ... some said that someone or other had seen you ... but we couldn’t find out anything definite, so we just supposed it was an empty rumour ...” The squirrel looked at him searchingly. “Well, that was ... that was because you didn’t come back.”
He sat there waiting for an answer, you could see that he was very keen to know what had happened.