How good mother was to me in those days I well remember. She encouraged me to tell her all I could of the Hall and its people, and all the incidents of my captivity, and she alone of my family seemed thoroughly to sympathize with me in my longing for my lost master.
Hazel, too, was very dear and good, and would listen with the greatest interest to my long yarns. She was a sweet little thing in those days, very small, but extremely well built and active, and, for a young squirrel, of a peculiarly rich colour. Rusty, however, had little sympathy with my longings. He was already a large, powerful squirrel of an extremely independent turn of mind, and most extraordinarily bold and fearless. Mother was in a constant state of anxiety about him, for he would go off on long expeditions quite alone, sometimes not coming home till nearly sunset, and ever since father’s death mother had been nervous as a hare when any of her children were out of her sight.
As for me, I soon became thoroughly at home in the wood, and could climb as well as either my brother or my sister, though I was at first by no means so adept at taking shelter as the other two. I had grown so accustomed to many sights and sounds ordinarily alarming to one of our tribe, that mother had often to scold me for exposing myself heedlessly to view on the rare occasions when people walked through the wood, and she had to show me all over again the tricks of lying out flat on a bough so that I could not be seen by passers-by, or of supporting myself on a trunk beneath a sheltering branch when danger in the shape of a hawk threatened from above.
The good and plentiful food with which I had always been supplied at the Hall had made me fat and strong beyond what squirrels usually are at my age. There was very little difference now between me and Rusty, though originally I had been smaller. It was lucky for me that I had been turned loose just at this special time of year, for autumn is, of course, the squirrel’s harvest, and food was particularly plentiful that season. Nuts were ripening among the yellowing leaves; acorns were to be had for the picking; the beech-trees were full of mast, and when we tired of these there were spruce-seeds and berries of every description.
Earlier in the year larch, fir, pine, and spruce tips had been our main sustenance, but these were now getting dry and old, for it was past the season of evergreen growth, and so we left them alone and fed almost entirely on nuts and seeds.
About this time we had several days of soft warm rain, and after them part of the horse pasture which adjoined the coppice on the other side from the Hall was thickly dotted each morning with little white buttons, which mother explained to me were mushrooms. We used to steal down across the wet grass in the mornings, brushing through the gossamer spiders’ webs till our chests and paws were white with them, and feast royally on the tenderest and daintiest of the mushrooms, sometimes getting terrible frights when the village children who came to fill their baskets saw us, and clapped their hands to make us run.
Mother was a wonderful forager. I remember one morning how she stopped on the bank where the beech-trees grow thickest, and after snuffing a moment or two, began to dig rapidly in the soft, black, loamy soil. Presently she nosed out some little round objects covered with a dark skin, and pushed one over to me. Never have I eaten anything more delectable than my first truffle. I can find them myself now as well as anyone.
Other fungi too were plentiful after that rain. Some grew under the trees, some on rotten logs, others out in the open. Some were good to eat—better even than mushrooms—but others were poisonous. Mother never passed a new one without showing us which were fit to eat and which were not. There was a brilliant scarlet kind which she warned us against strongly; well I remember how she scolded me one day because just for fun I pulled one up, and stuck it stalk down in a fork of a tree. I did not repeat the experiment, for it left a bad taste in my mouth for hours afterwards.
About this time my coat began to change. Squirrels that are born early in the spring have fur of a greyish-brown hue very like the coats that old squirrels put on in winter, but we, being June kittens, had summer suits of red-brown without any ear tufts, or any hair on the palms of our hands. First, my tail changed and grew darker, much heavier and more bushy. It turned to a blackish-brown, quite different from its previous bright chestnut-red hue. My coat, too, began, but more slowly, to lose its ruddy tint, and to assume its winter colouring. I became dark brownish-red on the head and back. My white under parts changed to grey, which spread along my sides. It also grew longer, softer and warmer, and my ear tufts began to show. During the summer a squirrel has but a few hairs on the points of the ears, but winter brings a thick tuft a full inch in length.
We squirrels have a strange peculiarity. We are the only living creatures, so far as I know, who change our coats twice a year and our tails once only. As I have said, we change our coats in spring and again before the cold weather, but our tails once only—in autumn. A healthy squirrel looks at his best in late September and early October, for at that time his new brush is extremely bright, while his new grey-brown coat is rich and long. Both fade during the cold weather, the fur especially becoming during long frosts of a yellowish rusty hue. There are, I believe, some squirrels, near relatives of our own, living in Canada, who turn almost white in winter. But as—luckily for ourselves—all we squirrels have the sense to sleep away most of the cold weather, we have not the same need to conceal ourselves by assuming the colour of the snow, as have Arctic hares and foxes and many other animals which are obliged to work and forage for a living during the hard weather.