On a fine sunny day, Charlie the chipmunk looked out of his doorway and said, “Gee! This is a lovely day. I guess I’ll go over to my friend’s, Doctor Hedgehog, and see if he can give me anything nice to eat!”
Now Doctor Hedgehog was Charlie’s nearest neighbor. He lived in a nice cozy house just a little piece beyond the log fence that Charlie’s yard was joined to.
So off started Charlie. He scurried down to the fence and stopped a moment to black his little bright eyes and brush his brown, white, and brown-striped back. Then he began to climb through the fence when suddenly he heard someone say:
“Good-morning, Charlie! Where are you off to in such a hurry this bright morning?”
Charlie looked up and found that it was Annabel the red squirrel, perched on the limb of the big hickory tree just over his head.
“Good-morning,” said Charlie. “I was only going over to Doctor Hedgehog’s a little piece beyond the fence to see if he has anything nice for me to eat!”
“From what I hear you might as well come with me,” said Annabel. “Old Doctor Hedgehog is away on a visit. If you come along with me, I’ll share what I have with you, for I believe it’s going to rain hard.”
“Is it?” said Charlie. “If you say so, it most surely is. You’re so clever you can always tell when it’s going to rain. I think I’ll go with you.”
So off they started across the field together.
“Oh, Charlie!” cried Annabel, as they ran along, “just listen to the pleasant noises everywhere! The blackbirds are singing and the woodpeckers are hammering at their desks, and just listen to that lonesome whistle of the bluejay! I sometimes think that is the most lonesome noise I ever heard. No matter if it is thundering or hailing or just pouring down with rain. The bluejay follows one about and sings his shiny song with a lonesome whistle, whistling just as the rain stops for a minute. Don’t you think it is lonesome?”
“You’ve caught it, Annabel,” said Charlie. “I’d rather hear his bark like laugh or his horrible screech any time than such lonesome music.”
After running along for some time both of them stopped to rest a little under a great tree just before reaching Doctor Hedgehog’s.
“By the way,” said Annabel, “what was all that banging about in your room the first time I called this morning?”
“Oh, that was a whole bushel of chestnut shells I was opening by means of my tail. Slipping one in my door and striking it with my heavy big tail on the end, you know.”
“A tail’s a handy thing,” said Annabel. “Did you ever stop and think how handy it really is?”
“Well, no, I think I never did,” said Charlie. “I think a tail’s a nuisance sometimes. But give me a tail just like yours instead. I think I could do so much with it!”
“There isn’t one in a hundred, Charlie, that would think of your tail being a nuisance. I’ve tried to use mine and tried to use mine for such things as yours can do but I guess I never learned how to use it properly. You spoiled your tail, Annabel,” he added. “If you could remember those long boring lessons that nothing happened to you at, you might be as talented as I.”
They had now come very near Doctor Hedgehog’s house.
“How very quiet it is today!” said Annabel. “Usually I’m greeted with a few pricks from a thornbush or two or skirmished with a dozen of his quills. Doctor Hedgehog is certainly away.”
She met with no other opposition and soon reached the house. She noticed a number of mushrooms in a cupboard and hastily filled a sack with them. They then turned around and followed closely behind by a number of prickly stick-ups or something exactly resembling them that nearly pierced their skins all the way, started home.
When they reached the fence Charlie said, “What a lucky thing Doctor Hedgehog was away, for just see how much quieter we came back than we went. It rained so soon after we started that I had my fine sail out before I reached home. By the way, why is it that you squirrels have the center of always being nuts as badly as you do? I never see your kind of nuts about as a rule in the winter months but I believe you’re eating them all the time?”
“Our piles are factory heaps of nuts or anything else we can find that’s edible in the summer. The first month in summer we come across mushrooms, and when we finish them we’re not sick of them you understand, as rabbits would be, for instance, but we’re so glad to see them off our hands we’re ever so willing to eat the very last one ourselves. Then we have berries, and when we can’t find anything else we hunt big-time. Eden cherries are not always to be disliked, you know, and corn cribs sometimes turn our way, and if things go very hard, well, we eat one another when we’re very hungry.”