When his wife thought Chaik had enough for two birds, she whisked the plate away. He couldn’t think where it had gone to, because she did it when his tail feathers were turned. So he had to look for something else; he began trying experiments with the newspaper, pick, peck, picking, to see if he couldn’t get a taste of those little black specks. He didn’t know it was printing, of course; he thought those nice even lines were cracks and the little black specks were very neatly tucked in—so neatly it would be great fun to pick them out again. Pretty soon he got excited and used his claws. The paper began tearing; that woke up Mr. Thomson.
Slam went the paper on the table; that sent Chaik fluttering, but in a minute he was back at it again busier than ever. And when the big man saw him he burst out laughing—and he didn’t laugh very often. He laughed so hard Chaik scuttled back into his corner with his crest tucked down.
But as soon as Mr. Thomson picked up his paper again Chaik began to cock his head. “Eh?” he thought. “He’s hiding, too. He’s hiding from me!” Wasn’t he just conceited? Out he sneaked. Pick, peck, pick—he tore off the whole corner that time. Then he got his claws in it and danced around like a cat on a sheet of flypaper. That man reached out his finger, carefully as he could, and held it down so Chaik could untangle his feet.
Chaik misunderstood. “You needn’t be afraid,” said he in his politest bird talk. “I won’t peck you.”
Mr. Thomson misunderstood, too. He said: “The nerve of that bird! He isn’t a bit afraid of me.” So of course from that very minute they began to be friends—the first friend Louie’s father ever had among the Woodsfolk.
I don’t s’pose you could guess who had the most fun that evening. It wasn’t Chaik—but he’d have insisted it was if any one had asked him. Didn’t he just have a lovely time? He found all sorts of interesting things. He rather wanted to hide some of them away so he could play with them again, but there weren’t so many good places to hide them. Take that little shiny cup for instance. It reminded him very much of an acorn with the top gone. You know what that was—it was a thimble. “Too bad it’s empty,” he sighed. “Now I wonder where house-folk keep their acorns—they must have a hole for them.” No jay could go housekeeping without one. But of course he couldn’t find it.
He thought of burying his treasure in the earth beneath one of the geraniums in a row of pots on the window sill. Just then he discovered the coffee pot; Louie’s mother was measuring the coffee into it for the morning, so its lid was open. Chaik was so pleased. He dropped his shiny acorn right in. Snap! shut the top. It wouldn’t come out again.
Didn’t he just make an awful fuss? He hopped all around it. He sat on the handle and he tried to sit on the little round button on the lid, but his feet kept slipping off. He tried to peek down the spout or to reach his beak in. Finally he got so cross he gave the stubborn old thing a peck. It made such a tinny sound he jumped away and perked up his crest at it. He’d just about decided that was a lost acorn when somebody got it out for him.
Whoever do you think it was? It wasn’t Louie, and it wasn’t his mother —it was Mr. Thomson! And it wasn’t just because he and Chaik had made friends; it was because everything that foolish bird tried to do set the big man laughing. And then Chaik would stop and look very hard at him as though he thought Louie’s father were trying to talk to him, so of course he had to pay attention. That’s manners in a boy or a bird.
He let Chaik peck a lead pencil into splinters to see what he could find, because that ignorant bird thought the lead was a worm-hole. He let him peck the button out of a chair cushion, just because it was fun to pull at. And when Chaik came tumbling off the table to pull at the shiny tag on the end of his shoe lace—you’d have thought he really believed he was being helped by that impudent bird. He grumbled a lot more than Louie when Louie’s mother wound up the clock and made them all go to bed.