The Second Wave by Michael Tod Read Free Book Online Page B

to be in a drey anyway, and the scent bothered him.
    He had been tempted not to use the drey, which was, he thought, too comfortable for serious Sun-serving squirrels, but the temperature outside was falling and the stars were frost-bright above the trees.
    ‘Just this once,’ he told Rusty and Chip.  ‘Tomorrow we find a more appropriate place.  We must get settled before winter really starts or we will starve or freeze to death.’
    Would he really care? Chip wondered.  His father seemed to seek pain and discomfort.  He would probably enjoy freezing to death, or starving.
    Crag led the way into the moss-lined interior of the drey, however, followed by Rusty and Chip, who was very conscious of the closeness of their bodies.  There was no room to lie away from one another, and he lay awake, rigid and tense, next to his mother, feeling the warmth of her body against his own.
    Later, much later, he dozed off, then woke to find his mother’s paw around his shoulder and her tail covering him.  He nestled against her and slept.
    When he awoke at dawn, he found himself alone in the drey.  He could hear his parents moving about outside.
    ‘Don’t let that youngster sleep on,’ Crag was saying.  ‘Flush him out for prayers!’
    Chip wriggled out into a world made magic by frost.  Every twig and leaf was encrusted with crystals of ice, built from the mist that had drifted in over the land during the night and was now dissipating in the sunshine.  Each crystal caught the light and sparkled in a tiny rainbow of colour.  The young squirrel looked about him in wonder.  It was all so beautiful.
    ‘ Your turn to say the Morning Prayer,’ said Crag.
    Chip had done so several times before, using the standard wording his father and mother had always done, but today, after the first section –
     
    ‘Be not too wrathful
    Oh Great Sun, on those squirrels –
    Who sinned in the night,’
     
    He felt moved to use his own words –
     
    ‘Thank you, oh Great Sun,
    For the beauty of your light
    In this sparkling world’.
     
     Rusty, thrilled by this unexpected prayer, turned admiringly towards her son, only to cringe as Crag reached out a paw and struck Chip across the head.  ‘Blasphemer!’ he hissed, and finished the prayer himself.
     
    ‘Let us serve your needs
    For the whole of this your day
    Weak though we may be.’
     
    Then, glowering at the unhappy youngster, he led his family down to forage on the chill ground.  Later they would search for a permanent base to create a New Temple.
     
    It was High Sun when Crag found what he was seeking.  In a clearing in the wood a huge gnarled oak stood, twisted by age.  Although it was blackened by the fire from a lightning strike many years before, lingering autumn-brown leaves on a few branches indicated that it was not yet completely dead.  A little way up the tree the hollow of the trunk forked to form two chambers above the large one below.
    Crag explored all the hollows, then came down to where Rusty and Chip sat silently waiting on the ground.
    ‘This will be our New Temple,’ he announced.  ‘There are suitably austere sleeping places for each of us to have their own, and great chambers to store the metal collection.’
    Chip groaned to himself, his teeth hurting at the very thought of holding rusty things again.  He looked appealingly at his mother.
    ‘Is it wise to use a tree that has been struck by lightning?  Might it not happen again?’ she asked.
    ‘Lightning never strikes twice in the same place,’ Crag assured her confidently.  ‘Now we start the collection.  Honour be to the Sun.’
     
     
     

 
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    Slate, a mature female grey squirrel, looked at the remains of the Oval Drey in the giant Oak at Woburn Park.  A winter and summer of neglect had made the drey look unkempt and drab.  It was hard to picture it as she had last seen it, bustling with activity.  That was before the Grey Death had killed its inhabitants, the