“HELLO? I’D LIKE TO speak to Chief Teckstar, please. Is he there?” Mr. Padgett leaned back in his swivel chair, fingering the telephone cord. He was at his desk, at work. Around him, workers at other desks crouched over piles of paper or in front of computer keyboards. The air-conditioning system moaned in the background. Outside, the sun had turned furiously hot. “Hello, Teckstar? Len Padgett here. I just wanted to call and say how much Mrs. Padgett and I appreciate the fine effort you made yesterday trying to find our little runaway…. Yes, I guess they told you. She spent the night in the woods…. No, no, she’s fine. Not a scratch on her. Of course, her mother and I are kind of shot up after…What? Oh no, she was never in any kind of danger. No danger at all. I found her early this morning, stuck up a tree, and brought her home safe and sound. She was mighty glad to see me. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about….”
Mr. Padgett swiveled his chair around so that his back was to a glassed-in compartment on one side of the room. It was the office of the department boss, Mr. Wick. Mr. Padgett was not supposed to use his desk telephone for personal calls.
“I wonder if,” Mr. Padgett began, “I wonder if, by any chance, you’ve noticed a rather frightening surge in Forest’s squirrel population lately? Yes…well…perhaps frightening is the wrong word. Nevertheless, there seem to be many more of the mangy little pests than usual. I was thinking we men might get together to see if we can’t bring the number down a bit, for the safety of our town and our children and our…
“What?…Well, a shooting party was what I had in mind. We could put aside a weekend and make a point of going after them. I’ve got a shotgun, and a good many other men in town have them, too…. Oh, I see….”
Mr. Padgett swiveled around in his chair to check on Mr. Wick. The old geezer seemed to have wandered out of his office. There was no sign of him anywhere.
“Look, Teckstar. I’m not suggesting a ‘massacre,’ as you put it,” Mr. Padgett went on, his voice rising. “Just a little sensible shooting with the idea of cutting the head count down to where the poor things won’t have to starve to death this winter. There’s too many of them, that’s the trouble. Why, I was out in my yard this morning and saw several huge packs sitting up in the tress. And that’s nothing compared to what’s back there in the woods. There’s thousands back there, and they’re strong breeders, let me say. Nothing stops a red-blooded squirrel from…What’s that?”
Mr. Padgett began to swivel his chair rapidly back and forth. He had never liked Chief Teckstar. The man couldn’t take an honest suggestion. He didn’t like to listen to reason.
“I know that Mother Nature takes care of things like squirrel populations!” Mr. Padgett bellowed into the receiver. “Do you think I’ve got the brain of a beetle? I just thought we might like to help her out a little, before the situation gets any worse!”
Mr. Padgett gave one final, powerful swivel that spun his chair all the way around. Then he glanced up. Good grief! Every face in the room was turned toward his desk. Everyone was staring straight at him. It was just like the scene in his yard that morning, when all those pesky squirrels had surrounded him and stared at him as if he’d done something terrible. And then he had! He’d gone out and almost shot his own daughter! Those horrid pests had gone and made him shoot his own…
“Mr. Padgett, may I please have a word with you in my office?” said a quiet voice behind him.
Mr. Padgett jumped and whirled around. “Uh, Mr. Wick!” The old turnip was quick as a cat. He’d crept up behind him without the smallest noise. Mr. Padgett’s face turned bright red. Forgetting to say good-bye to Chief Teckstar, he hung up the phone.
“This way, Mr. Padgett, if you would be so kind,” said Mr. Wick in his quietest and most deadly voice.
Mr. Padgett stood up with pounding heart. He hadn’t felt so frightened since the sixth grade, when Mrs. Ramsbottom had caught him and sent him to the principal’s office for drawing those awful pictures of her during math class.
“So, Dad, did you have to take the pictures with you to the principal’s office?” Amber asked at dinner that night, after Mr. Padgett had told them all about Mr. Wick and Mrs. Ramsbottom and his dreadful day at work. Luckily, he had not been fired, only shamed and dishonored and publicly cut down to beetle size.
“Huh? What?” Mr. Padgett looked exhausted. There were circles under his eyes.
“You know, the bad pictures you drew,” said Wendell, sitting forward eagerly. “Did you have to show them to the principal?”
“Well, I—”
“Now, children,” Mrs. Padgett broke in. “That is not something you need to know. That is something from the deep, dark past. Your father is upset and—”
“Well, at least tell us what the bad pictures looked like!” Wendell couldn’t help exclaiming. “Was Mrs. Ramsbottom topless, or bottomless, or wearing purple underwear, or—”
“Wendell! Please hush!” said his mother, but Wendell went right on.
“Listen, yesterday I saw this picture in a magazine at the drugstore? It was of a lady in a sports car advertisement who was completely naked except for the teeniest, weeniest, little pair of pink—”
“Wendell! That is quite enough!”
“They weren’t what you think,” Wendell said indignantly. “They were only—”
“Wendell!” Mrs. Padgett’s fork clattered to her plate.
Mr. Padgett stood up abruptly and left the table.
Amber pushed her chair back and got up, too.
“Come on, Wendell, we’ve got work to do,” she said. “But first let’s help Mom with the dishes. Looks like everybody’s had a hard day today.”
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 squirrel 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.