THE DISCONTENTED SQUIRREL

Hurrying along the street the other day, intent on business, I was brought to a sudden full stop by the sight of a heap of old books in tattered covers outside a second-hand furniture shop. I didn’t want old books, and had no time to spare; the action was purely automatic, like that of the old horse ridden or driven by a traveller who often refreshes himself, in stopping short on coming to a public-house on the roadside. On the top of the heap was a small pamphlet or booklet in blue covers, entitled _The Discontented Squirrel_, and this attracted my attention. It seemed to touch a chord, but a chord of what I did not know. I picked it up, and, opening it, saw on the first page an ancient rude woodcut of a squirrel eating a nut.

The old picture looked familiar, but I was still at a loss until I read the first few lines of the letter-press, and then I immediately dropped the booklet and hastened on faster than ever, to make up for a wasted minute.

Why, of course, the Discontented Squirrel, that dear little ancient beastie! The whole of the child’s tale came back with a rush to memory, for I had read and re-read it when my age was seven; though I had never since met with it in the hundreds of boxes of old books turned over in my time, or in any collection of children’s books of the early nineteenth century. I once made a small collection of such literature myself, and others have collected and still collect it in a large way. I sometimes wonder why some enterprising publisher doesn’t start an Every Child’s Library, and rescue many of the most charming of these small publications from total oblivion. Undoubtedly he would find the best period was from 1800 to about 1840.

Once upon a time--so ran the story as I remembered it, and retold it to myself while walking on--a squirrel lived in a wood, as plump and playful and happy a squirrel as one would wish to see. He had a favourite tree, an old giant oak, which was his home, and when summer was nearing its end he began to amuse himself by making a warm nest in a cavity down at the roots; also by hoarding a quantity of hazel-nuts, which were plentiful just then in the wood. This he did, not because he had any reason for doing it, or thought there was any use in it, but solely because it was an old time-honoured custom of the squirrel tribe to do these things.

While occupied in this way he all at once became aware of a new restlessness and excitement among the birds, and when he asked his feathered neighbours what it was all about, they were surprised at his innocence, and answered that it was about migration. And what was migration? A funny question to put to a bird! However, they condescended to inform their ignorant young friend that migration meant going away from the country in order to escape the winter. For now winter was coming, that sad season of leafless trees and of short, dark days; of wet and wind and bitter, bitter cold, when lakes and streams would be frozen over, and the earth buried in white, awful snow.

And where would they go to escape these awful changes?

They would go to a land where there was no winter; where the trees were green all the year round, with flowers always blooming, and fruit and nuts always ripening.

“Oh beautiful land! oh happy birds!” thought the squirrel. “But where is that desirable country?” he asked.

“Over that way,” replied the birds, pointing to the south, just as if it were a place quite near. “It was,” they added, “beyond the ridge of blue hills one could see on that side.”

These tidings threw the squirrel into a great state of excitement, and he spent his whole time running after and questioning every bird he knew. “When,” he asked, “would the migration begin?”

They laughed at the question, and said it had begun some time ago, and was going on at the present moment. The swift had long been gone; so had the night-jar; the cuckoo too; and others were beginning to follow.

The cuckoo--his own neighbour and familiar friend! Ah, that was why he hadn’t seen him for some days past! And then began an unhappy time for the squirrel, and every day and every hour increased his discontent. The yellowing leaves, the chillier evenings, and long nights filled him with apprehension of the coming change, and at last he resolved that he would not endure it. For why should he stay in such a land when all his feathered neighbours and friends were now hurrying away to a better one?

Having made up his mind to migrate, he set out at dawn of day, and travelled many miles toward those blue hills in the south, which turned out to be much farther than he had thought. It was not until the late afternoon that he arrived at the foot of the ridge, feeling more tired and sore-footed than he had ever been in his life. Nevertheless he was determined not to give in, but to cross the hills before dark, and in crossing them perhaps view from the summit that beautiful land to which he was travelling. And so up and ever up he went, finding it more fatiguing every minute, until he began to despair of ever reaching the summit. And he never did; it was too high, and he was now spent with hunger and weakness after his long fatiguing day. Furthermore, the hillside grew more and more barren and desolate as he got higher, until he found himself in a place where it was all stony, without trees and bushes or even grass; and there was no food to be found, and no shelter from the cold, violent wind.

He could go no farther, and the summit was still far, far above him. Hunching himself up on the stony ground, with his nose down between his paws and his bushy tail spread along his back, he began to reflect on his condition.

Why had he not taken into account that he could not travel like a bird with wings to bear him through the air, and over hills and rivers and long stretches of rough country? And when he asked the birds how long it would take them to reach that happy land of everlasting sunshine beyond the blue ridge, had they not answered in a careless way, as if they thought little of it, “Oh, not long; two or three weeks, according to one’s powers”? And it never occurred to him that a bird can fly farther in half an hour than a squirrel can travel in a whole day! Now, when it was too late, when he could not go forward, and his home was too far, far behind him, he remembered and considered these things. Oh poor squirrel! Oh miserable end of all your happy dreams!

And while he was sitting hunched up, shivering with cold and thinking these bitter, desponding thoughts, a passing kite spied him, and swooping down, snatched him up in his talons and carried him off. Little strength had he now to struggle, and at his least movement the sharp, crooked claws tightened their grasp; and even if he had been able to free himself, it would only have been to fall that vast distance through the void air and be crushed on the earth.

Then all at once the bird’s flight grew swifter and rose higher, for now a second kite had appeared, and had given chase to the first to deprive him of his prey.

The first, burdened with the squirrel, could not escape from his persecutor, and they were soon at close quarters. The marauding bird now began making furious swoops at the other, aiming blows at his back with his claws, and every time he swooped down he uttered savage cries and mockings. “Aha!” he cried, “you can’t save yourself with all your speed and all your doublings. Drop that squirrel if you don’t want your back cut into strips. Do you remember, you red rascal, that you found me carrying home a duckling I had picked up at a farm, and made me drop it? Do you remember what you said on that occasion--that I was burdened while you were free, so that you had the advantage of me, and would claw my back to ribbons unless I dropped the duckling? Well, robber--pirate! who has the advantage now?”

It was awful, that battle in the sky; the blows, the shrieks, the dreadful imprecations they hurled at one another; but in the end the kite was obliged to drop the squirrel to defend himself with his claws, and the poor little beastie fell earthward like a stone, and would have been crushed if he had fallen upon the ground; but, luckily, he first struck a close mass of twigs and foliage on the top of a large tree. This broke the violence of the fall, and he came down gently to the branches beneath, when he managed to catch hold of a twig and come to a stop. He was bruised and bleeding, and half-dead with the shock; but by and by he revived, and then what was his relief and joy to discover that he was at home--that he had fallen into his own favourite old oak-tree! On recovering a little strength he crept down the trunk, and after satisfying his hunger with two or three hazel-nuts from his store, he crawled into his unfinished nest, where he coiled himself up, and drawing the blankets over his ears, mused drowsily on his unspeakable folly in having forsaken so comfortable a home. And as to migration--well, “Never again!” he murmured as he dropped off to sleep.

The story greatly pleased me as I retold it to myself, after having forgotten it for so many long years, since I now perceived that it was a fable of the right sort; that, in fact, it was a true story--in other words, true to the creature’s character. Stories about reasoning and talking animals do not always conform to this rule, which has made the terse fables of Æsop a joy for ever. Whether the author knew it or not, it is a fact that the squirrel is subject to fits of discontent with his surroundings, which send him rushing off in quest of some better place to live in; and at such times he will make his way, or try to, over wide stretches of barren, unpromising country. Thus, when trees are planted in a treeless district, by and by squirrels make their appearance, even when their nearest known haunts are many miles distant. Nor is this only an occasional outbreak of a gipsy roving disposition of the animal, since he too is subject to migratory impulses at the same time of year as the birds. In some countries large numbers of squirrels are affected simultaneously in this way, and have been observed migrating, many perishing when attempting to cross rivers too wide or swift for them.

I also liked the story because it recalled a squirrel’s adventure told to me a short time before by an old fisherman at Wells-next-the-Sea, in Norfolk. Wells lies at the edge of a marsh a mile and a quarter back from the sea, and has a harbour, a river or estuary which at full tide is deep enough to enable small vessels to come up to the town. Near the river’s mouth there is a row of tall guiding poles in the channel, and one afternoon my informant noticed a squirrel sitting hunched up on the summit of the outermost pole, about thirty feet above the water. Evidently he had come through the pine plantation on the sand-dunes on the Holkham or north side of the river; but, anxious to continue his travels southward along the shore and over the vast flat saltings towards Blakeney, he had cast himself into the river at low tide, and finding the current too strong, had just saved himself from being carried out to sea by climbing up the last pole. Now the current was the other way, and the river full from bank to bank: the poor squirrel on his pole-top was in the middle of the swirling current, and dared not venture into the water again, either to go forward or back to the wood.

The fisherman went home to his tea; but, two hours later, just about sunset, he strolled back to the sea-front, and there still sat the squirrel hunched up on the top of his pole. Presently a fishing-boat came in from the sea, with only one person, a young man, in it. The old man hailed him, and called his attention to the squirrel on the pole. “All right; I see him!” shouted back the young fellow. “I’ll try to get him off!”

Then, as the swirling current carried the boat up to within about three yards of the pole, he leant forward and thrust out an oar until the blade touched the pole; and no sooner had it touched than down like lightning came the squirrel from his perch, leaped upon the oar, and from the oar to the boat, then quickly bounded up the mast and perched himself on the top.

The squirrel had not understood the man’s friendly intentions, and his lightning-quick action appeared not to have been prompted either by reason or instinct, but rather by that intuitive faculty one is half-inclined to believe in, which causes an animal suddenly threatened with destruction to take instantly the one line by which it may be saved.

The boat went swiftly on, driven by the rushing tide, until it reached the quay at Wells, and no sooner did the keel touch the stones at the landing-stage than down the squirrel flew from the mast-top, and rushing to the bow, took a flying leap to the land, then dashed off toward the town at topmost speed. A number of children playing on the quay saw him, and with a wild cry of “Squirrel! squirrel!” went after him. Luckily there was no dog about; and the squirrel being faster than the boys, kept well ahead, and, dodging this way and that among coal-trucks and wagons and horses, and men occupied in unloading, got through them all, then crossing the lower or coast road, dashed into one of the wynds or narrow streets which run up to the higher part of the town. There more yelling children joined the hunt, and the people of the wynd ran out of their houses to find out what all the uproar was about.

The wynd ends at the upper street, and facing it is a long brick wall ten feet high, and up this wall went the squirrel without a pause or slip, as swiftly as when going over the level earth, and disappeared over the top into the orchard on the other side. There the loud advancing wave of young barbarians was stayed by the wall, as by an ocean-facing cliff.

It had been a dashing performance, and the squirrel could now have settled safely down in that sheltered spot among its fruit and shade trees, since the tenant, who lived a hermit life in the house, was friendly to all wild creatures, and allowed neither dogs nor cats nor fiends in shape of boys with loud halloo and brutal noise to intrude into his sacred grounds.

But this would not have suited the squirrel; the town noises and lights, the shrill cries of children at play in the evening, and the drum and fife band of the Boy Scouts would have kept him in a constant state of apprehension. Squirrels are nervy creatures. No doubt when the town was asleep and silent that night he scaled the back-wall and crossed other orchards and gardens until he came out to the old unkept hedge on that side, and followed it all the way to Holkham Park, a vast green solitude with many ancient noble trees, in one of which he probably first saw the light.

And there, at home once more, he perhaps resolved, like the Discontented Squirrel of the fable, never again to attempt to better himself by migrating.