Forest Page 7

  “Command minks, draw near! The time has come for us to begin work on a plan that, if successful, drive these barbarian aliens from the town of Forest—forever!”

  The command minks were so impressed by this forceful speech that they came forward to applaud the Supreme Commander.

  “Hooray, Barker!”

  “This is clear thinking, I must say.”

  “Congratulations, old chap!”

  “You know, I believe we may have a chance of defeating these evil aliens!”

  “A chance! It’s a sure thing!”

  From the center of a blackberry bush somewhere in the Second Quadrant:

  “Well, Laurel, this town is certainly heading for trouble.”

  “Oh, Woodbine! I’m so scared!”

  “The mink-tails of Forest are going to war for the first time in our long and quiet history.”

  “It’s unbelievable. Our troops are massing even now.”

  “Who knows what will happen next. We may be defeated and driven from our trees. Our town may be destroyed by alien weapons. Even if we win—for Barker is a brilliant commander, a military genius, it is said—even then, many hundreds of mink-tails will be killed in battle. Those who survive will live on, alone, weeping for their lost ones.”

  “My whole family has volunteered for the army! My mother, my father, my sisters and brothers. They say all those things will happen if we don’t fight. The aliens have plans to wipe us out. We must attack first if we are to win and save ourselves.”

  “Rubbish and corn rot! Barker and his power-hungry friends have invented these tales to frighten us.”

  “I’m not so sure. The aliens might not be as innocent as you think, Woodbine. Anyway, why would Barker and his friends wish to frighten us?”

  “They want to go to war, for their own purposes. They like giving orders and being in charge, and are probably plotting to get rid of the Elders as soon as they can.”

  “I don’t know. It’s so hard to see clearly.”

  “If only we could speak to the invader. Though she is young, she is powerful I’ve seen her eyes. She would not be in favor of this war and might help us try to avoid it.”

  “Speak to the invader! Woodbine, are you crazy? How could we talk to such a strange being? Have you forgotten how she kidnapped your sister and still holds her captive?”

  “I believe the invader was bringing Brown Nut back to us when Barker’s troops struck last night.”

  “How do you know? The aliens act in confusing ways—you said it yourself.”

  “I was there watching. I saw how the invader came with her companion, the little alien. While our army was scrambling into formation, I saw how carefully she climbed the tree, carrying a pouch on her back. When she reached her nest, I saw her take a box from the pouch and open it with gentlest fingers. Inside was Brown Nut. I saw the invader speak to my sister and tell her to go free.”

  “But, Woodbine, how do you know what she said? No one understands the aliens’ bubbling noises. Maybe the invader was planning to make Brown Nut into an example by slaughtering her before our eyes.”

  “There are some things that can be understood no matter what the language.”

  “For a dreamer, Woodbine, you are certainly wide-awake.”

  “Laurel, you are my only friend. I have a plan. Will you come with me to visit the invader?”

  “But that is more dangerous than battle. The invader was wounded last night. Reports say she lies in her nest, surrounded by killer aliens. Also, Barker is watching you. One false move and he will have you arrested.”

  “Will you come, anyway? We’ll try to sneak past the guard-minks. It’s our only chance to rescue Brown Nut before the war begins.”

  “War! What have we idiot mink-tails come to?”

  “Please, please say yes? I would feel so much better if you came along.”

  “Of course I’ll come. But I think we may be sorry we ever left this blackberry bush.”

  LOWER FOREST

  AMBER PADGETT LEANED BACK against pillows and stared up at the ceiling of her room. It was the only place she could look comfortably, aching as she did in every bone and joint. She’d spent all of yesterday lying in bed and still felt no better this morning. The fall from the white oak tree had been a hard one.

  Across the room, the little squirrel was curled up asleep in the hamster cage. She had eaten a good breakfast of dried corn and raisins. Now she seemed in no worse condition than before her tumble from the tree two nights ago. Perhaps, Amber thought, the box had softened her landing. Wendell had found her cowering inside it on the ground and insisted on bringing her home again.

  Nothing had cushioned Amber’s fall. A bandage across her chin covered a gash that had needed ten stitches to close. Her left wrist was fractured and encased to the elbow in a cast. Two back teeth were cracked from her chin’s impact with the ground. (The dentist would see to them later, when she could open her mouth.) Finally, her head throbbed from a concussion that the doctor had called “worth watching.”

  “You were lucky not to break your neck,” he said. “And what are these odd little bites all over your shoulders?”

  She had refused to answer. Wendell had done it for her, the double-crossing rat. Except for a scratch across one cheek, he was hardly hurt at all. Not even a sprained ankle.

  “Wendell is younger. And softer,” Amber’s mother explained. “I suppose he just sort of bounced.”

  Mrs. Padgett was being a most attentive nurse, always hovering in the bedroom door, trying to be cheerful. She appeared now, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

  “Amber dear, can I bring you some more chicken noodle soup?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Another magazine or a book?”

  “No.”

  “A puzzle, a sweater, a radio, a—”

  “Mother! I’m all right!”

  “Well, you can’t mope around all day again staring at the ceiling.”

  “Why not? It’s the only thing can do.” Tears welled up in Amber’s eyes. She turned her head away to hide them.

  A small breeze came through the half-open window, flapping the torn screen to and fro. Outside, Amber saw a flash of green go by, disappear, then flash by again. It looked like a tree branch signaling in the wind.

  “Tell Wendell to come,” she told her mother suddenly.

  “Wendell! I thought you were never going to talk to him again. I thought he was on your permanent blacklist.”

  “He is. Tell him to come, anyway. Soon.”

  He arrived half an hour later—slouched in, his eyes on the floor. Amber saw that he was on the verge of tears himself, this soft brother, this bendable, traitorous one.

  “So what’s happening out in the world?” she asked him coldly.

  “Oh, Amber, I’m so sorry. Please, please don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to tell about the squirrels. Mom and Dad got it out of me. I was upset, and they made me tell.”

  “Who says I’m mad?” Amber inquired. “Did I say I was mad?”

  “No.” Wendell sniffed. “But you are.”

  “I’m not mad at all, actually,” Amber said with a painful clench of her jaw. “I’m just…” She looked over at the little squirrel sleeping safely in her cage.

  “Furious! I know!” wailed Wendell. “I was so stupid!” He pounded himself on the head. “I should have said we just fell out of the tree. I shouldn’t have told about the squirrels attacking us. Now Dad is going to—”

  “Sh-sh-sh!” Amber put her good hand over his mouth. “What’s done is done. Right now I need information. What’s going on? Mom won’t tell me a thing. Is Dad on the warpath?”

  “Yes!”

  “I thought so.”

  “He’s over talking to Chief Teckstar.”

  “I knew it.”

  “I heard him on the phone yesterday. He’s going to organize a search-and-destroy mission.”

  “A what!”

  “You know, like in the movies. Search-a
nd-destroy. I heard him talking about the squirrels, how there are too many of them, and they have gotten sick, and now they are attacking people and need to be stopped. He wants to clean out the forest, that’s what he said. He told Chief Teckstar it was time to clean their clocks.”

  “Clean their clocks! Good grief!”

  “I don’t get it,” Wendell said after a brief pause. “Do the squirrels have clocks?”

  Amber knotted her fist and struck it on the mattress.

  “It’s an expression,” she explained. “It means that Dad has flipped out. He’s taking this squirrel attack personally.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Listen, Wendell. These squirrels don’t have clocks. What they do have is minds. They’re smart. They attacked us because they were frightened and wanted to protect themselves. We were invading their trees, right? Anyone would be terrified after Dad’s shoot-out in the backyard.”

  “But I thought you said the squirrels would understand,” Wendell said. “You know, because we buried their dead ones.”

  “Well, they didn’t see us do it. Or they didn’t like how we did it,” Amber said. “Or something. Whatever it is, they’re frightened and angry. But that is no reason to kill them off. We’ve got to stop this search-and-destroy mission.”

  “But how?”

  “Sh-sh. Let me think.”

  In the silence following this command, Wendell began to hear soft noises coming from the window. At first he thought it was the wind rustling through the broken screen. But when he turned to look, he saw that the edge of the screen had flapped wide open. Just inside, cautiously sniffing and crouching, were two small gray squirrels, their tails rising behind them like fine sprays of mist.

  Wendell was so amazed that he could not speak. He simply froze, sitting on the end of Amber’s bed. But perhaps some invisible current of excitement made its way to his sister, because a moment later she looked up and spied the intruders, too.

  Did the squirrels know they were being watched? They investigated the windowsill with nervous sniffs, then jumped down on top of a bookcase that ran underneath. A lopsided stack of paperbacks caught the interest of one. It nibbled the edge of a page. The other examined an electric pencil sharpener of Amber’s that hadn’t worked for several months. Its quick squirrel eye followed the cord down to where it was still plugged into the outlet, uselessly, after all this time. Then the little creature sat up on its haunches and looked straight at Wendell.

  Zap! Wendell was almost knocked over by the intelligence of its gaze. The squirrel had not stumbled through the window by chance.

  Amber cleared her throat. “It’s my squirrel!” she whispered to Wendell. “See his ear? He’s the same one we picked up in the yard, the same one that came to study me, close up, in the tree. I’m sure of it now.”

  Amazing but true. The squirrel staring at Wendell had only one ear. There was a ragged place where the other ear had been. The wound still showed. The other squirrel, his companion, jumped gracefully to his side and sat up, too. It was more elegantly made, with finer ears and dark-furred feet. Now that Amber had recognized the first squirrel, the particular markings on the second were easy to see.

  “Why are they here?” Wendell rasped.

  Amber nodded at the hamster cage. The little squirrel was no longer asleep. She was up, peering at the newcomers, her sinewy squirrel paws gripping the bars. Standing that way, on her haunches, she looked so much like a small person—a small, furry person with bright eyes and a cap—that Amber felt a twinge for having ever shut her in. The more she saw of these squirrels, the more like people they seemed.

  The two on the bookcase had begun another round of sniffing and probing. They were thorough and businesslike and showed extraordinary balance in. their small, quick steps. Nothing on the cluttered bookcase top was knocked over, or as much as jostled. Their long, full-bodied tails were feather-light. Like banners, they floated above the two busy heads, registering surprise, curiosity, uncertainty, distrust.

  Amber and Wendell were so afraid of frightening the little animals that they hardly dared to breathe during these investigations. Finally they were rewarded. Both squirrels sprang off the bookcase and ran in one sweep past the bed to the hamster cage. Amber’s squirrel jumped on top of it, while the other went so close to the little squirrel that they seemed to brush noses. Then there was a great flicking of tails.

  “I think they know each other!” Wendell whispered in delight.

  But the best part was still to come. With their greetings finished, the three squirrels gathered close together, or as close as was possible with one barred away from the others. A strange series of noises, half chirp, half mew, rose out of their huddle, and it became clear that a conference of some sort was under way. What was being discussed the children couldn’t tell. Nor were they prepared for the next moment, when all three squirrels turned as one and fixed them with powerful, dark eyes.

  A low, chittery whir began. Amber and Wendell, who had heard this very sound in the tree, moments before the squirrels’ nighttime attack, shrank back. But soon the sound climbed to a higher key. It wavered and warbled on a thin edge, swelled, and fanned out like a fountain of water. It shrilled, then quieted…softened…became mysterious. …With light steps, it dropped down to lower platforms of tone.

  Wendell sat enthralled. He had never heard anything like it in his life. Amber, recalling how the old silver-haired squirrels had chittered in a single voice when they came to look at her that first morning in the tree, leaned forward and tried to trace meanings in the sounds. This was language, she understood. She and Wendell were being spoken to. They were being informed of certain facts or shown certain views or warned of certain dangers or…what? Amber strained to understand. She knew it was important, but there was nothing she could catch hold of to make the translation begin.

  The squirrels’ performance continued. Their voices synchronized perfectly. No single one stood out from the others. All blended into a wondrous flow of sound, a surge that Wendell would later describe as “music” and that Amber turned around and around in her mind. Where did the secret of their speech lie? If not in words, then in what? In rhythm or pitch? In loudness or vibration? She wondered if her ears simply could not hear this language. Perhaps its patterns and meanings were beyond the human range.

  The voices sank lower, to the deep-chested whir of the beginning. Then all stopped at once and the squirrels posed silently for a few moments, before coming down on all fours again. On the bed, Amber moved her legs under the blankets, and Wendell touched his hands to his ears.

  The visitor squirrels swirled around the hamster cage for another minute or so, then leapt off the low table and made for the bookcase and the windowsill. Amber took this opportunity to ease out of bed. She padded across the rug to the cage and opened the sliding door in its front.

  “Go on, little squirrel. Go off with your friends. They came especially to get you, I think.”

  The squirrel drew away shyly when she spoke. But when Amber continued to stand motionless, holding the door up, she crept forward and sniffed the opening. She put her front feet over the entrance, brought her back feet out with a hop, and halted suspiciously. Encouraging chirps erupted from the two watching by the window. The little squirrel jumped to the floor and joined them in a flash on the sill. A second later, all three had disappeared through the screen, and a patter of paws rose overhead from the roof.

  Amber let the door slide back in place and turned to Wendell.

  “I have a plan,” she announced. “Are you ready to go to work?”

  “Ready,” breathed Wendell. “Tell me anything. I’ll do it.”

  “You’ll have to do a little spying for me this afternoon. And we’re getting up early tomorrow morning. Really early, before sunrise.”

  “Before sunrise! Oh, wow! Are we going to run away?”

  “Sh-sh-sh!”

  Wendell clapped his hand over his mouth.

  “We are n
ot going to run away. We are taking a trip on the bus to Randomville,” Amber whispered.

  “Weird!” Wendell gazed at his sister. “But why?”

  “You know that man who wrote my library book?”

  “What book?”

  “Woodland Animals and Their Habitats. Remember? Professor A. B. Spark, who teaches at the university. I was thinking that he might like to study our squirrels.”

  “But we’re studying our squirrels,” Wendell objected. “And we haven’t even started yet. We don’t want a lot of other people coming around and—”

  “Wendell, listen. There are times when the best thing to do is go for help. We’re in one of those times. If we don’t get some help on our side, fast, there won’t be any squirrels to study. My idea is to somehow convince Professor Spark of how smart our squirrels are. Then maybe he’ll want to study them. And if he wants to study them, then he might help us stop the search-and-destroy mission.”

  Wendell shook his head. “How do you even know he still lives in Randomville? This book looks old.”

  Amber shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “And if he is still there, how will we find out where he lives? And then how will we get to it? Anyway, he’s probably too important to speak to us. Or maybe he hates squirrels. Or children. Or he was knocked unconscious in a car crash and can’t hear or see or think or…”

  Amber laughed at this feeble list of doubts. What did Wendell think she was, some kind of small-time operator? No! She was a master of detail, a maestro of design, a thinker of dazzling cleverness, etc., and so on. Hadn’t she already proved it a hundred times?

  Wendell sighed and nodded.

  Well, then…

  Amber ordered the phone book brought to her and demanded a report on Mrs. Padgett’s whereabouts. (In the kitchen.) She sent Wendell to the fire station to spy on the search-and-destroy mission and report back. She found a map of Randomville on her father’s bedside table, called the bus station for departure times, stowed travel clothing under her bed, took out her wallet and counted her money ($14.26), and pretended to be asleep when her mother came in to check on her. (In fact, she was feeling remarkably wide-awake. And better.)