“Good-bye, Mappo!” cried the little girl squirrel. “I am glad I met you, and I’m sorry you’re going to run away again. But I won’t tell them where you are. I guess I’ll go hide, too.”
So Mappo, the merry monkey, ran off through the woods one way, and Slicko ran the other, and they did not see each other again for some time.
I might say that I expect to tell you, in a book after this one, some of the adventures of Mappo, the merry monkey, but I have no room for him in this story.
Slicko ran on through the woods, jumping from tree to tree as she had been taught. She was all alone again, and she was feeling rather lonesome without Mappo, or for some of her squirrel friends.
Slicko made her way back to the nest where her aunt had lived. She rather hoped Mrs. Whitey might be back there, waiting for her, but the nest in the tall tree was still empty. There was no sign of the nice old lady squirrel.
“Well, I guess I had better gather some nuts, and hide them away,” thought Slicko. “I may have to stay in this nest a month or more, until papa and mamma make a new home for me, and my sister and brothers.”
So Slicko scrambled down to the ground again, and began to gather nuts and acorns. These she carried up to the nest, hiding them away under the leaves. Some she put in a hollow stump, on the ground not far away from the tree where the nest was.
When Slicko had done this, she sat down on her tail, curling it up at her back like a feather, to take a rest, for she was rather tired.
“My!” she thought, as she sat there. “What a lot of things have happened to me since I had to leave my home. An owl got after me, I have seen a circus, I met a monkey and I have seen a creature, with two tails, called an elephant. At least an elephant looks as though it had two tails, no matter what Mappo says,” went on Slicko. “I wonder if I shall ever meet Tum Tum, and tell him I am not a rat or a mouse? What a funny thing it would be if I did.”
Slicko sat on the edge of the nest for some time, and then she began to feel hungry.