Forest Page 6

  Mrs. Padgett smiled gratefully at her daughter.

  “The dishes! Forget it!” cried Wendell. “I never do the dishes. I’m only a little kid.”

  “Listen!” Amber whispered when she had pulled him out to the kitchen. “There’ve been hundreds of squirrels rustling around in our trees all afternoon. I want to take the little squirrel back to her own people tonight, before anyone gets upset. If you want to come, too, and spend the night outside with me…”

  “Mom will never let me. She thinks I’m a baby.”

  “I repeat: if you want to spend the night outside with me, you must help me do the dishes. Right now. And look happy about it, okay?” Amber said fiercely.

  “This is stupid,” Wendell whispered back, but he took up a dish towel.

  Not more than ten minutes later, Amber had negotiated the deal. “He’s old enough—look at him,” she said, while Wendell tried to smile and dry a pot at the same time. “And besides, I’ll be there to look after him.”

  “Well, all right,” murmured their mother feebly. Wendell nearly dropped the pot. “And thank you again, dear ones, for taking care of the dishes.” She put an arm around Wendell. “It was so very, very, very, very thoughtful of you both.”

  She might have gone on for several more delirious sentences if another loud rustling noise hadn’t suddenly risen outside the house. They all stopped to listen. It sounded like the passing of hundreds of feet overhead, or the thrashing of disturbed branches, or the chatter of little voices. Perhaps it was all three at once.

  “There go those squirrels again,” Mrs. Padgett said, looking up. “I swear there seem to be more of them all the time!”

  The sun had no sooner set over Goodspeed Hill than two plans went into operation at the Padgett house. Amber was in charge of both, to Wendell’s great delight.

  “The first is the cover plan, the one we say we’re doing and pretend to carry out,” Amber explained in a low voice in the upstairs bathroom, where they had gone to talk. “It is that we’re sleeping out in the field tonight and will be back for breakfast in the morning. The second plan is the real one, the one the first plan turns into after everyone is asleep.”

  “Oh, wow!” Wendell couldn’t help screaming.

  “Sh-sh-sh!”

  No one knew how to run an operation better than Amber. She was a master of detail, a maestro of design, a thinker of dazzling cleverness. This, anyway, was how Wendell saw his sister, especially now that she had managed to liberate him from the house and the bedtime clutches of his mother.

  “Where are we going to sleep? In a tree?” he demanded.

  “Sh-sh! Your voice is much louder than you think. People can hear you for miles. If you want to pull off a plan, the first trick you have to learn is how to whisper,” Amber whispered. “You know how Mom always seems to know what you’re going to do before you do it? Guess how she finds out.”

  “She hears me say it?”

  “That’s right. She has ears.”

  “Weird! Well, how’s this?” Wendell said in a sort of scratchy growl. He hadn’t practiced whispering very much. Yelling had solved most of his problems in the past.

  “Better. Now listen.”

  Amber explained the plans that would shortly unfold, including a part Wendell particularly loved in which they stuffed their sleeping bags with clothes to make it look as if they were still in them. Twenty minutes later they marched out the back door, carrying knapsacks, sleeping bags, and a mass of blankets toward the field.

  “Have a good time,” Mrs. Padgett’s cheerful voice rang out behind them. “And, Amber, please remember to get that other sleeping bag down from the tree tomorrow. It’ll be ruined if it stays up there much longer.”

  “Sorry, Mom. I forgot all about it. I’ll get it tomorrow, I promise.”

  “I bet you didn’t really forget about it, did you?” Wendell growled in his new gravelly voice as they tramped away.

  “No, I didn’t,” Amber said.

  “You left it up there on purpose so we could go back, right?”

  “Right.”

  Wendell shivered with pleasure. “Did you bring the little squirrel?”

  “She’s in a shoe box in my knapsack.”

  “Won’t Mom notice she’s gone?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s got to take care of Dad. He’s in bad shape. She’ll have to use all her energy putting him back together by morning. That’s why she probably won’t bother checking on us, either, so our plans will work.”

  “But even if she does check on us, she’ll think we’re still there because of…”

  “The stuffed sleeping bags, right. Look out. Your voice is starting to screech again.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Wendell pounded himself on the head and hunched down toward his sneakers. It seemed to help lower his tone.

  “Amber?” he rasped. “How do you know stuff like this? I can never figure it out.”

  She shrugged. “I guess I just watch. You know, if you’re jumping around and yelling all the time, you can’t see anything, but everyone can see you. But if you’re quiet, and stay off to one side, then you can see things and hear things, and people won’t know you know.”

  This was information that would have been lost on Wendell an hour ago. Now, in the thick silence of the night field, a small moon of understanding began to rise in his mind. When Amber shortly said, “Okay, it’s time to head into the forest. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut,” he knew exactly, what she meant.

  “Maybe we’ll hear the squirrels speak their own language,” he croaked. “Maybe we’ll be able to figure out what they’re saying.”

  “Maybe,” whispered Amber. “Now sh-sh-sh!” They tramped through the woods for what seemed a long time. Dim moonlight filtered through the branches. They navigated with the help of a small flashlight that Amber had brought. The forest sounds were eerie. Hoots and strange howls, flutters and coughs, squeals and mysterious thumps erupted from the dark all around them. Wendell had a sudden vision of an undiscovered, alien world working away just beyond their rim of sight.

  “Amber?”

  “Sh-sh!”

  Without warning, something dropped in their path. Amber leapt back, pulling Wendell with her. But when they recovered their breaths, they saw it was only a rotten branch. Nothing to worry about. Wendell’s hands were sweaty. He wiped them on his jeans and set off after his sister again. He had left his knapsack back with the sleeping bags in the field. (It had made an amazingly real-looking human head for the bag.) But Amber was wearing her knapsack. She was walking carefully, he saw, because the little squirrel was inside. Her sneakers made almost no noise as they passed under the trees. Wendell’s feet, on the other hand, kept getting tangled in bushes, which he then had to wrench free of, which caused a lot of thrashing and delay as they went along.

  “How do you…?”

  “Take smaller steps,” Amber whispered. She touched his head protectively. “Don’t worry, you’re doing great.”

  They reached the tree with the rope. Amber handed it to Wendell.

  “You go up first,” she whispered.

  “How?”

  “Shinny! Like you do at the firehouse.”

  Wendell had spent a fair amount of time practicing shinnying up the firehouse pole over the years. He had no trouble pulling himself up the rope, which was thinner but far less slick. But when he arrived on the first branch, he took a wrong step, fell over, and just barely saved himself from plunging to the ground by grabbing a smaller limb with one hand.

  “Good grief! Are you all right?” Amber hissed from below.

  “Yes.”

  “Hold on tight. Here I come.”

  The sleeping bag was still nailed up, exactly as Amber had left it.

  “Look. Squirrel droppings. They’ve been using this place,” she exclaimed.

  “Oh no.”

  “It’s good. It means they’re interested in us. They’ve been checking us out. Also, they’ll find the little s
quirrel faster if we have to leave her here. She’s still sort of wobbly and probably can’t walk too well.”

  Amber opened the knapsack while Wendell brushed off the sleeping bag and crawled out on it.

  “This is the greatest. The greatest!” he cheered. I’m in a secret tree house! No, I’m on a flying carpet heading for the moon! No, I’m a squirrel who lives up here, and runs in the trees and I’ve never, never touched the ground in my whole—”

  “Wendell! You are waking up every animal in this forest.”

  “Oops…sorry.”

  Amber took the shoe box out of her knapsack, then removed a rubber band and the cover, which was punctured with holes. The little squirrel was crouched inside, her eyes wide and worried.

  “Okay, you can go,” Amber said. “Go on. Go back to your friends.”

  The squirrel’s tail quivered a little. Otherwise she didn’t move.

  “I was afraid of this,” Amber said. “She’s still sort of in shock, I guess. She probably thinks we’ll shoot her if she starts to run away.”

  “Well, just let her stay there, then,” Wendell said. “She’ll get up her courage after a while.”

  So Amber crawled out on the sleeping bag with Wendell, and they both lay back and put their hands behind their heads.

  “Don’t worry. The sleeping bag will hold,” Amber whispered. “It’s made of Gore-Tex. Also, I used a ton of nails and really hammered them in well.”

  “Mom will love you.”

  “I guess we have to wait now, and see what happens,” Amber said. She gazed through the branches toward the starry sky overhead. The moon looked brighter and bigger, as if they were a lot closer to it than they’d been on the ground.

  “Isn’t it nice up here?” she asked. “So quiet and friendly feeling. Maybe it’s the last truly peaceful place in the world, and these squirrels are the only ones who know about it. They could probably tell us a few things if we’d let them.”

  “Sh-sh! I’ve been hearing rustling sounds,” Wendell whispered.

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. All around.”

  They lay side by side in silence. The leaves were like a curtain surrounding them. Occasionally they fluttered or twitched, as if something was passing in back of them.

  “I have the weirdest feeling we’re being watched,” Wendell rasped.

  “Look!” Amber pointed up.

  Small, dark shapes appeared suddenly in the branches over their heads. The shapes swirled and leapt about, and dropped closer to them.

  “This is quite unusual,” Amber’s voice said in Wendell’s ear. “I didn’t expect any action. Squirrels don’t like the dark. They can’t see in it. Like us, only worse. They don’t ordinarily go out at night.”

  “Well,” said Wendell in his regular voice, “there sure are a whole lot of them out here now. There are more over there, and some more coming up on us from below. And there’s a big black mass of something creeping across from those trees on the right….”

  Amber sprang up.

  “Wendell, I think we should get out of here,” she said in a low voice. “Something strange is happening.” An odd chittery sound had begun and was swelling louder and coming near. “The squirrels are upset. Come on. Let’s start climbing down. Move slowly, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Wendell inched himself off the sleeping bag. Amber put on her knapsack and was about to follow when she remembered the little squirrel. She reached for the shoe box, and was placing it gently in the middle of the sleeping bag, where it would be safe, when—the attack struck. Squirrels flew at them from all directions, landing on their shoulders and backs, the tops of their heads.

  “Help!” Wendell screamed. “They’re all over me!”

  They were all over Amber, too. She tried to bat them away, but there were too many. Their nails were sharp and scratched through her shirt. Amber dropped the shoe box and watched in horror as it toppled and fell off the edge of the sleeping bag.

  “Ow! Ow!” Below her in the tree, Wendell was squirming and twisting.

  “Jump!” Amber yelled to him. “Don’t use the rope. Jump!”

  “I can’t!” he screeched. “They’re getting in my face. I can’t see.”

  Amber struggled down toward him, carrying what seemed to be five or six squirrels with her. She covered her brother’s head with her arms and beat at the mass of darting creatures. Their fur felt slippery. A frightening smell of wild animal rose up her nose.

  The squirrels began to fall away. One last one clung to Wendell’s collar. She grasped it by the back and yanked it off.

  “Now, Wendell! Jump!” she cried, and more or less flung him from the tree. Then she hurled herself off the branch. A thick layer of cool air gushed past her as she fell through the dark toward the ground.

  UPPER FOREST

  NEWS OF THE DEFEAT of two dangerous aliens who had crept into town after dark and hidden out in the invader’s abandoned nest flew across Upper Forest with the first rays of morning light. Many mink-tails were excited by the victory, which showed how well the town could defend itself against outsiders when the need arose.

  But many others were frightened. The return of the aliens, one of whom was rumored to be the deadly invader herself, was widely viewed as a declaration of war. Why else would the aliens have come back except to spy and plot more mink-tail murders?

  “They are after our hides, no doubt about it,” Barker told an official group of command minks who had gathered in the white oak to examine the battle site. “The Elders are in total agreement on this point.”

  By some means not entirely clear, Barker had managed to put himself in charge of the other command minks and their operations. He was now Supreme Commander Barker, who spoke hourly to the Elders. They relied on his advice.

  “And the sure sign of the aliens’ intentions is this,” he went on. “That they brought their prisoner with them to dangle cruelly under the noses of our troops.”

  “You mean Brown Nut? She is still alive, then?” a command mink in charge of the pond quadrant inquired.

  “She was alive when last seen,” Barker corrected. “The aliens brought her confined in a box, which they flung to the ground when our attack began. Later they were seen dragging poor Brown Nut away again. She remains in their hands, suffering who knows what tortures.”

  “Ach! It is bad. What is the world coming to when such barbarians rise up to occupy our trees?”

  “What it is coming to,” said Barker, with a cool flick of his tail, “is that stronger action must be taken. It is no longer enough to think simply of defending ourselves. We mink-tails must sharpen our wits and go actively on the attack if we are to survive.”

  Several command minks groaned when they heard this. Their troops had so little experience with, military action. It was hard enough to organize the daily marches around Forest’s perimeters and to keep the volunteer lookouts awake at night. To have to go further, into the planning and carrying out of ambushes and attacks, well, when would anyone have time to sleep?

  “I should think after last night the aliens would see the madness of continuing their invasions,” the command mink in charge of the Random River quadrant piped up. “Perhaps they will just stop. And then we can stop. And then life can go on as it did before: peacefully and independently on both sides.”

  Barker sized up the speaker with quick eyes and made a mental note to replace this commander. He would advise the Elders about it that very day. No weak or spiritless leadership could be tolerated in the mink-tail army. The future of Forest’s mink-tails depended on it, not to mention the future of the Supreme Commander (ahem). After all his hard work persuading the Elders to trust him and do what he said, Barker wasn’t about to let this war fizzle out.

  He narrowed his eyes and addressed the Random River command mink sternly.

  “Be careful, Officer! Your words sound remarkably like those of the traitor and coward Woodbine. His own sister is kidnapped, and yet he refuses
to join our troops. Do you know that he goes out to the pond every day to sleep in a blackberry bush? His family is disgraced. His sister is abandoned. Meanwhile, he complains that he does not believe in fighting. Hah! He is afraid, as everyone knows. One little ear blown off and he runs away to hide.”

  “It is said that Woodbine speaks admiringly of the invader,” the pond-quadrant command mink said. “Can this be true?”

  “I can say no more than that we are watching him,” Barker replied. “If he should try to contact the aliens again, for any reason, we would be forced to take quick and drastic action.”

  “Contact them again! Does that mean he has been passing information to the Lower Region?”

  “Draw your own conclusions. I must be silent for reasons of mink-tail security,” Barker replied in such disturbing tones that the command minks looked at one another in alarm.

  “And now let us turn our minds to nobler things—to the waging of war!” the Supreme Commander commanded. “The Lower Region may have its blasting weapons, but we have our numbers. Our army is truly massive. It is training now to travel in power swarms through our trees and to strike like lightning. The aliens are few, by comparison, and separated by their box nests.

  “Despite our brilliant victory against the invader and her sidekick last night, our future strategy will not be to attack the aliens directly,” Barker went on. “They are larger and stronger. Our goal will be to destroy their living systems. For instance, there is a juice that runs through the wires along their paths and roadways. Their nests are addicted to it. They quickly shut down when the juice is interrupted.”

  A juice? The command minks were amazed to hear of such a thing. They had traveled these wires for years, and never guessed. They knew so little about the Lower Region. They had not really thought of it as a place before. Barker had certainly done his homework.

  He continued briskly, “I have discovered also that the aliens’ communication systems are extremely primitive. They depend on complex sending and receiving devices that most aliens cannot understand. One small malfunction and crunch!—the device is out of order. Then no one can fix it until specialists are called in. And what if the paths and roadways have been blocked by various means I have in mind?