Part 5

No doubt they were cold too, for they had no little furry mother to curl herself about them and keep them warm. Poor babies! I suppose they cuddled as close together as they could, and cried and cried, and wondered why mother did not come home and take care of them.

At last, when morning came, the strongest one—that was our Little Mitchell, you know—felt so desperate that, although he was only two or three days old and had not got his eyes open yet, he climbed up to the crotch of the tree to find out what he could.

All he felt was the cold keen air of the early morning; and then, being all confused, I suppose, and not knowing how high he was from the ground,—for his eyes were tight shut, remember,—he tried to walk out into space, and down he fell,—not to the ground, oh dear, no! If he had fallen to the ground he would have been killed, and this story would never have been told.

When he felt himself falling, he caught at the tree-trunk with his little claws, and managed to get hold of a piece of loosened bark. Here he clung, terribly frightened, and crying like a little baby,—which, indeed, he was.

Perhaps it was a good thing for him that his eyes were shut, for how frightened he would have been to look down and see the earth so far below him!—such a cold, unfriendly earth, too, with nothing on it for a baby squirrel to eat.

I do not know how long he had been clinging there and crying before the lady came. For now it is time for his lady to come along, and when she once comes Little Mitchell will be in the story every minute until it ends.

You see, as soon as breakfast was over and they had all eaten all the hot corn-pone and fried cabbage they wanted, the lady was ready to start up the mountain.

The little children and their mother and the school-teacher were sorry to see the lady go, and the father looked anxious,—for Mount Mitchell is a very wild mountain and a very big one, and he was afraid they would get lost. He offered to go and show them; but the guide said no, he knew the way.

So the lady and her guide started on up the mountain in the cold morning air, and it became so steep right away that the lady had to keep stopping to get her breath.

It was while she was stopping to breathe that the guide said,—

“Listen! I hear a boomer, and I would like to get to see it.”

“Boomer” is their name for the little red squirrel, of which the mountaineers are very fond, and which is not nearly so common there as the big gray squirrel. The people who live down below call the mountain people “mountain boomers,”—why, I do not know, unless perhaps they think they live in the mountains like squirrels.

Well, the guide began to look around to find the boomer, and the lady looked around too, and at last they spied a little squirrel clinging to the bark of a tall chestnut tree, twenty feet from the ground, and crying very hard.

They soon found that it was no boomer, but a tiny gray squirrel. The guide threw up small sticks and bits of bark to make him run; but he did not stir, even when a bit of bark hit his tail.

Then said the guide, “I’m going up to get him.”

So up the tree he went, clinging with arms and knees, for the tree-trunk was so big his arms could not reach half-way around it.

It was a very hard climb, but the man got there at last, and, catching the little fellow by the tail, came sliding down, the little squirrel squeaking frantically, for it was both frightened and hurt at being handled in that rough way. Its own little bunny mother never picked it up by the tail, you know.

The man put the little fellow in the lady’s hand, and, to her surprise, she saw it was a young gray squirrel with its eyes not yet open.

And now you know it was Little Mitchell, who had fallen out of his nest and was lying there in the lady’s hand.

Such a funny little fellow as he was!—all head and feet, with almost no body at all, and a queer little stub of a tail that was hardly as long as his queer little body.

The lady laughed when she saw him, and then she felt very sorry for the helpless little one.

What could she do with him? She could not lay him down on the cold mountain and go away and leave him. And yet he must just as surely die if she took him, she thought, for she had nothing with which to feed him.

He nosed around in her hand in such a comical, helpless way, not crying now, but whimpering like a very tired, worn-out little baby,—which, you know, is just what he was.

Finally the lady started on with him in her hand; but he squirmed and whimpered so, she soon grew tired of holding him—and then, what do you think she did?

She had on a warm flannel waist with a soft loose belt, and into the waist she tucked him. In a moment he had worked his way down under the belt, where he snuggled up, stopped crying, and went fast asleep.

You see, he was almost dead from cold and weariness.

On went the lady, slowly climbing up the steep mountain; and the wonder is that Little Mitchell was not squeezed to death under her belt. But he slept on.

On through the great chestnut forest went the lady and her guide,—on past the handsome tulip trees, the great oaks, and all kinds of beautiful forest trees.