The life story of a squirrel

by T. C. Bridges

In the afternoon, after it was all over, and just as Walnut and I were starting out to find our evening meal, there came a fresh invasion. It was headed by the stout new tenant, gorgeously arrayed in a check shooting suit, which in itself was enough to scare any self-respecting squirrel out of his wits, and with him walked five others like unto himself. He was evidently giving them all an account, a glorified account, of what had happened. By the way he pointed and ran a few steps, and let fly with his fist, it seemed as if he personally must have killed the whole gang of poachers, and they all listened attentively, though one or two laughed behind his back.

I learnt afterwards from Cob that he had seen a man going about with the sacks full of dead pheasants the poachers had dropped. He had scattered them here and there throughout the wood. This had puzzled him much, and he had watched to see if they were left there; but, no; when the shoot was over the pheasants were picked up again with those that had really been shot by the guests, and in this way they made up quite a big bag.

All this poaching business does not seem to have much to do with my life. Indirectly, however, it had, for the new tenant of the Hall was so angry about the poaching that on the very day after the battue he set a whole gang to work to run barbed wire—of all awful things!—round the whole of the coppice. Other men were put to lop the hedges close, and two new keepers engaged. The latter were worse than Tompkins. I suppose it was by way of justifying their existence that they walked about all day with their guns, firing at almost everything they could see that was not game. It became almost impossible to show our noses outside our homes during daylight, and many an evening Walnut and I went hungry to bed. Life became one prolonged dodging, for even when the new keepers were not about the workmen would take pot shots with stones at any of us they could view. Incidentally, too, they knocked over many a fat rabbit and dozens of the remaining pheasants. But of these proceedings their employer, intent on saving his coverts from the village poachers, remained in blissful ignorance.

At last there came a crisis. Walnut and I had taken advantage of the quiet of the midday hour—the men being at their dinner—to steal out and get some beech-mast, when suddenly a missile of some sort hissed just above my head, cutting away a twig close above. I paused an instant in utter amazement, for I had heard no report, when—ping! another bullet whacked on the bark close below my feet, and there was a brute of a boy in corduroys, his head peering from behind a trunk, and in the very act of stretching the elastic of a heavy catapult. One quick bark to Walnut, and we were both away as hard as we could lay legs to the branches. A third buckshot whizzed close behind my brush as I fled. The boy, seeing us run, at once followed and began positively showering shot after us. It was impossible to reach home under the bombardment, and if we had not been lucky enough to find a knot-hole in a beech just large enough to shelter the two of us, one or other—both, perhaps—would have been maimed or killed.

This was the last straw. For some days a vague resolution had been forming slowly in my brain. That night, as we crouched, almost too hungry to sleep, in our oak-tree home, I told Walnut we could stay there no longer, but must leave the coppice where we had so long sheltered.

He seemed rather to like the idea than otherwise, being young and ready for adventure.

Very early next morning I slipped across to the old beech and told my mother. I was anxious that she and the others should accompany us, but this she would not do.

‘No, Scud; I am too old to leave my home. I shall stay here and take my chances. But you, I think, are wise to go. Waste no time in getting off, for you must be well away before the men come to their work.’

A few minutes later Walnut and I had crossed the road and were hastening away across an open field bound due north. We went that way because we could go no other—a squirrel migrating invariably travels north. I do not know the reason, but some instinct implanted in us ages and ages ago, perhaps even before men began to walk erect, tells us to do so, and we obey it, and shall obey it, thousands of years hence. In just the same way the Norwegian lemmings march in their myriads towards the sea, and are drowned in the salt waves in a vain, instinctive effort to reach some place that has long disappeared beneath the waves.