He soon began to run along on the beam; thence he ascended to the scaffold, and made his way towards an open window. He jumped up to the window sill, and then disappeared. The boys all ran around, outside, and were just in time to catch a glimpse of him, running along on the top of the fence, down towards the woods again.
"Do let us run after him and catch him," said Rollo.
"Catch him!" said Jonas, with a laugh, "you might as well catch the wind. No, the only way is to set our trap for him again. I meant to let him go, myself; but he is not going to slip through our fingers in that way, I tell him." So Jonas went down that night and set the trap again.
For several days after this, the trap remained unsprung, and the boys began to think that they should never see him again. At last, however, one day, when Rollo was playing in the yard, he saw Jonas coming up out of the woods with the trap under his arm. Rollo ran to meet him, and was delighted to find that the squirrel was caught again.
HOW TO KEEP A SQUIRREL
Jonas contrived to tighten the wires of the lender, by weaving in other wires so as to secure the little prisoner this time; and when he was fairly in his temporary cage, the boys were so pleased with his graceful form and beautiful colors, especially the elegant stripes on his back, that they begged hard to keep him; and they made many earnest promises never to forget to feed him. Jonas said, at last,
"On the whole. I believe I will let you keep him, but you must do it in my way."
"What is your way?"
"Why, after a day or two, we must carry him back to his raspberry-bush, and let him go. But you may give him a name, and call him yours, and you can carry some corn down there now and then, to feed him with,--and then you will see him, occasionally, playing about there."
James and Rollo did not exactly like this plan at first, but when they considered how much better the little squirrel himself would like it, they adopted it; and Rollo proposed that they should tie a string round his neck for a collar, so that they might know him again.
"I can get mother to let me have a little pink riband," said he, "and that will be beautiful."
"It would be a good plan," said Jonas, "to mark him in some way, but he might gnaw off the riband."
"O no," said James, "he could not gnaw any thing on his own neck." Rollo thought so too, and they both tried to bite their own collar ribands, by way of showing Jonas how impossible it was.
"I don"t know exactly what the limits are of a squirrel"s gnawing,"
said Jonas. "Perhaps he might tear it off with his claws."
"Or he might get another squirrel to gnaw it off for him," said James.
"Yes," said Jonas, "and there is another difficulty. He might be jumping from one tree to another, and catch his collar in some little branch, and so get hung, without judge or jury."
"What can we do then?" said Rollo.
"I think," said Jonas, "that the best plan would be to dye the end of his tail black. That would not hurt him any; and yet, as he always holds his tail up, we should see it, and know him."
The boys both thought this would be excellent, and Jonas said he had some black dye, which he had made for dyeing some wood. Jonas was a very ingenious boy, and used to make little boxes, and frames, and windmills, with his penknife, in the long winter evenings, and he had made this dye out of vinegar and old nails, to dye some of his wood with.
"I am not certain," said Jonas, "that my dye will color hair; I never tried it, except on wood. Do you think that black would be a pretty color?"
"No," said Rollo, "black would not be a very pretty color, but it would do. Yellow, and red, and green, are pretty colors, but black, and brown, and white, are not pretty at all."
"I have not got any yellow, or red, or green," said Jonas. "I don"t know but that I have got a little blue."
"O, blue would be beautiful," said James.
Then Jonas walked along into the barn, and Rollo and James followed him.
He went up stairs, and walked along to the farthest corner, and there, up on a beam, were several small bottles all in a row. Jonas took down one, and shook it, and said that was the blue.
He brought it down to the cage; Rollo went into the house, and brought out an old bowl, and Jonas prepared to pour out the dye into it. They then concluded that they would carry the whole apparatus down into the edge of the woods, and perform the operation there; and then the squirrel, when he was liberated, would easily find his way back to his home. Jonas carried down a pair of thick, old gloves, to keep the squirrel from biting him.
As they walked along, Rollo proposed that Jonas should dip the squirrel"s ears in as well as his tail; "because," said he, "we may sometimes see him when he is half hid in the bushes, so that only his head is in sight."
"Besides," said James, "it will make him look more beautiful if his ears and tail are both blue."
Jonas did not object to this, and after a short time, they reached the edge of the woods. They found a little opening, where the ground was smooth and the gra.s.s green, which seemed exactly the place for them. So they put down the cage and the bowl of dye, and Jonas began to put on his glove.
"Now, boys," said he, "you must be still as moonlight while I do it. If you speak to me, you will put me out; and besides, you will frighten little Bunny."
The boys promised not to speak a single word; and Jonas, after unfastening the fender from the front of the box, moved it along until there was an opening large enough for him to get his hand in. Rollo and James stood by silently, and somewhat anxiously, waiting the result.
When the squirrel saw Jonas"s hand intruding itself into the box, he retreated to the farther corner, and curled himself up there, with his tail close down upon his back. Jonas followed him with his hand, saying, in a soothing tone, "Bunny, Bunny, poor little Bunny."
He reached him, at length, and put his hand very gently over him, and slowly and cautiously drew him out.
Rollo and James gave a sort of hysteric laugh, and instantly clapped their hands to their mouths, to suppress it; but they looked at one another and at Jonas with great delight.
Jonas gradually brought the squirrel over the bowl, and prepared to dip his ears into the dye. It was a strange situation for a squirrel to be in, and he did not like it at all; and just at the instant when his ears were going into the dye, he twisted his head round, and planted his little fore teeth directly upon Jonas"s thumb. As might have been supposed, teeth which were sharp and powerful enough to go through a walnut sh.e.l.l, would not he likely to be stopped by a leathern glove; and Jonas, startled by the sudden cut, gave a twitch with his hand, and, at the same instant, let go of the squirrel. Bunny grasped the edge of the howl with his paws, and leaped out, bringing the bowl itself at the same instant over upon him, spattering him all over from head to tail with the blue dye.
The boys looked aghast for a minute, but when they saw him racing off as fast as possible, and running up a neighboring tree, Jonas burst into a laugh, which the other boys joined, and they continued it loud and long, till the woods rang again.
"Well, we have spotted him, at any rate," said Jonas. "We will call him Leopard."
The boys then looked at Jonas"s bite, and found that it was not a very serious one. In fact, Jonas was a little ashamed at having let go for so small a wound However, it was then too late to regret it and the boys returned slowly home.
As they were walking home, James said that the squirrel"s back looked _wet_, where the dye went upon him, but he did not think it looked very _blue_.
"No," said Jonas, "it does not generally look blue at first, but it grows blue afterwards. It will be a bright color enough before you see him again, I will warrant."
So they walked along home; the fender was put back in its place in the garret, the bowl in the house, and the box in the barn. Jonas soon forgot that he had been bitten, and the squirrel, as soon as his back was dry, thought no more of the whole affair, but turned his attention entirely to the business of digging a hole to store his nuts in for the ensuing winter.
FIRES IN THE WOODS.
All the large trees that Jonas had felled beyond the brook, he cut up into lengths, and hauled them up into the yard, and made a great high wood-pile of them, higher than his head; but all the branches, and the small bushes, with all the green leaves upon them, lay about the ground in confusion. Rollo asked him what he was going to do with them. He said, after they were dry, he should burn them up, and that they would make a splendid bonfire.
They lay there drying a good many weeks. The leaves turned yellow and brown, and the little twigs and sticks became gradually dry and brittle.
Rollo used to walk down there often, to see how the drying went on, and sometimes he would bring up a few of the bushes, and put them on the kitchen fire, to see whether they were dry enough to burn.
At last, late in the autumn, one cool afternoon, Jonas asked Rollo to go down with him and help him pile up the bushes in heaps, for he was going to burn them that evening. Rollo wanted very much that his cousins James and Lucy should see the fires; and so he asked his mother to let him go and ask them to come and take tea there that night, and go out with them in the evening to the burning. She consented, and Rollo went. Lucy promised to come just before tea-time, and James came then, with Rollo, to help him pile the bushes up.
Jonas said that the boys might make one little pile of their own if they wished; and told them that they must first make a pile of solid sticks, and dry rotten logs as large as they could lift or roll, so as to have a good solid fire underneath, and then cover these up with brush as high as they could pile it, so as to make a great blaze. He told them also that they must make their pile where it would not burn any of the trees which he had left standing, for he had left a great many of the large oaks, and beeches, and pines, to ornament the ground and make a shade.
Rollo and James decided to make their pile near the brook, between the bridge which Jonas made of a tree, and the old wigwam which they had made some time before of boughs. They got together a great heap of solid wood, as large pieces as they could lift, and at one end they put in a great deal of birch bark, which they stripped off, in great sheets, from an old, decayed birch tree, which had been lying on the ground near, for half a century. When this was done, they began to pile on the bushes and brush, taking care to leave the end where the birch bark was, open.
After they had piled it up as high as they could reach. Rollo clambered up to the top of it, and James reached the long bushes up to him, and he arranged them regularly, with the tops out. So they worked all the afternoon, and by the time they had got their pile done, they found that Jonas had thrown almost all the rest of the bushes into heaps; and then they went home to tea.