Why, of course he was alive—alive and speaking to the squirrel! I could hear him distinctly. The wind outside was madly beating against the house and trying to force its way through the window, and was making a hundred strange noises—little sharp shrill broken sounds that mixed with and filled the pauses between the wailing and shrieking gusts, and somehow the woodpecker was catching these small sounds in his beak and turning them into words.
"Hullo!" he said. "Who are you and what are you doing there?"
"I'm a squirrel," responded the other. "I've said so over and over again, but you will go on worrying me! My only wish is that I could bring my tail just a little more to the right so as to hide my head and paws altogether from you."
"But you can't. Hullo! squirrel, what are you doing there? You forgot to tell me that."
"I'm eating a nut, confound you! You know it; I've told you ten thousand times. I can't ever get it up quite close enough to bite it and I haven't tasted one for seventeen years. One forgets what a thing tastes like."
"I know. I've been fasting just as long myself. Never an ant's egg! Hullo! Have you got it up? How does it taste?"
"Taste! You fool! If I could only move I wouldn't mind the nut; I'd go for you like a shot, and if I could get at you I'd tear you to pieces. I hate you!"
"Why do you hate me, squirrel?"
"More questions! Because you're green and yellow like the woods where I lived. There were beeches and oaks. And because your head is crimson red like the agarics I used to find in the woods in autumn. I used to eat them for fun just because they said they were poisonous and it would kill you to eat them."
"And that's what you died of? Hullo! Why don't you answer me? Where did you find red agarics?