Silence woke him. The thick, dark silence seized him by the tail, jerked him up, dropped him down, hard.

Toaff didn’t open his eyes. It was wrong enough to hear nothing; Toaff didn’t dare to open his eyes and see nothing. Or, worse, to open his eyes and see something horrible that had finished off a whole den of squirrels and was now waiting for him.

At that thought, his eyes burst open.

The light told him it was morning, but except for that everything was different, and wrong. There was the wrong amount of light in the den and it was coming from the wrong direction. The round entrance was in the wrong place. There were no squirrel shapes waking up all around him, and no squirrel voices chittering and chukking.

No sounds came from outside either.

Toaff did not move.

Something was wrong with his nest, too. His nest wasn’t thick and soft and—he shifted, twisted to get his paws under him, but why did it hurt to move?—and then he remembered. There was a black cracking of the darkness, and he was thrown sideways, and he heard frightened chukking as he tumbled over, falling backward. But after that, nothing. Not one thing. After that, everything was as black as sleep.

Toaff shook off crumbled leaves and began to wonder: Why was the den empty? What had happened to all the squirrels who lived there with him? Had something bad happened to Soaff? He scrambled to the entrance, and he had to go down, not up, to get outside. What could change up to down?

Whatever it was had also moved the broken stump from just above the entrance to just below it, which did offer Toaff a good perch from which to look out over the pasture. He scrambled out onto it, and stared.

What he saw first, and mostly, was snow. What wasn’t buried under snow was piled high with it. Even the bare limbs of the maple trees, and the horse chestnut tree, too, had thick lines of snow lying along them. Fresh snow weighted down the wide branches of the evergreens, bright white against a green so dark it looked black. A silence as heavy as the snow lay over everything.

Toaff sat up on his haunches on the broken stump, forelegs gathered up against his narrow chest, and listened. Nothing. The storm had blown away all the usual sounds of a winter morning. Then a crow that had been perched high up in the horse chestnut kaah-kaahed and flew off. He watched the bird soar over across the pasture toward the humans’ big red nest and wondered if it was showing him where everyone else had gone. Without him.

Branches and twigs lay scattered about, black dots and lines on the snow’s smooth white surface. Two thick maple limbs had been ripped off and tossed down onto the pasture. When Toaff looked up over his shoulder at his own tree, he understood exactly what had happened: The pine had been broken in half. The tree had snapped at a point that used to be below their entrance and now its long upper trunk, where their den was, slanted down to touch the snowy ground. This made a long path Toaff could run along to get down. Or—he looked backward and upward—he could climb the short distance up to the break, where jagged blades of wood stuck up into the icy air.

To see more, he scrambled up to the break. He wondered if anything had happened to the humans’ big white nest, but it still had the same square shape and stood on the same spot. He was glad to see that the two apple trees were also unharmed, except that the little round fruits that had been clinging so stubbornly to their bare branches had disappeared. Blown off by the wind, he guessed, and buried in the snow. He could sniff out those apples, if he wanted to, and he thought he probably wanted to. Looking out from the ragged top of the broken pine, Toaff wondered where the others could have fled to. How did they manage it, in the storm, in the night, with those young ones to carry?

He wondered, but he didn’t worry. Once a squirrel has learned to forage, he knows his mother is ready for him to leave her nest and forget all about having a mother. It might feel strange being alone like this but it didn’t feel wrong.

Toaff stayed there on the stump until well into the morning, but he neither saw nor heard nor smelled any sign of squirrel. No machine moved, no human appeared, and no fox came to dig out a buried body. Just the occasional crow was up and about. Eventually, Toaff went back inside, where what had once been the floor was now the ceiling and what had once been the ceiling was now the floor.

He ate some seeds and then tidied the scattered stores together into piles. He wove a new nest out of bits and pieces of the old ones, which was easy to do since this new nest just needed to be big enough for one. When he was satisfied that the den was in order, Toaff went back outside, to consider the best way to get to the apple trees.