It may have been a day, or a week, or, for all I know, a month before I woke again. My sleep had been so deep that for a full minute I was quite unable to realize where I was or what had happened, and I lay contentedly still in that pleasant, dreamy state between sleep and wakefulness. Then my eye was caught by a tiny brilliant sunbeam, which, striking through some minute interstice in the mossy door, made a little path of golden light in which little motes of dust danced gaily across our hollow retreat.
Slowly recollection returned, and with it a feeling of perfectly ravenous hunger. Struggling up out of the deep hollow in my mossy bed into which I had sunk, I stretched, yawned, and, looking round, saw Rusty with one eye open gazing at me with a drowsy, puzzled expression. Mother and Hazel were still wrapped in deepest sleep.
I barked to wake Rusty; but he only blinked at me without speaking, until at last I leant over and nipped his ear. That woke him.
‘Weasel take you, Scud!’ he growled, starting up. ‘Your teeth are sharp.’
I told him I was simply starving.
‘Come to think of it, so am I,’ he said, stretching and yawning in his turn. ‘Let’s go and get some grub.’
‘Hadn’t we better wake mother and Hazel?’ I suggested. But Rusty thought not, since they were so sound asleep. Standing up on my hind-legs, I pulled away the plug of moss that closed the entrance, and sprang out, with Rusty close at my heels. What a sight met our eyes! Even hunger was forgotten in amazement. The rays of the morning sun shining from a sky of clearest, palest blue were reflected back from one universal dazzle of white. Below us the ground was an even plain of snow, which had covered up and hidden grass, dead fern, fallen branches, ant and mole heaps—all the irregularities to which our eyes were accustomed—under its deep smooth carpet. From the bare branches of the beeches and oaks the snow had melted and fallen away, but the evergreen boughs still bent under heavy loads, from which in places long, transparent icicles drooped. It was freezing hard, for the surface of the snow sparkled with crystals of ice, which shone more brilliantly even than dewdrops in the slanting rays. No breath of air stirred under the cloudless heavens, and the wood had a new stillness which was almost awe-inspiring.
But, oh, the air! Cold as it was, it had a dry tingle which set the blood fairly racing in our veins, and every moment increased our already ravenous hunger. Recovering from our amazement at the strange novelty of all around us, we bounded off together, intent on a store of beech-mast which lay beneath a twisted root of our own old beech.
It was a queer sensation, that first landing upon the snow. So hard frozen was it that our light weights made no impression upon it whatsoever. You would have needed the skill of a fox to find our tracks. Rusty was the first to reach the spot where we had made our store.