The Blowing Away of Mr. Bushy Tail
Mr. and Mrs. Bushy Tail, a squirrel couple, are struggling through a brutal winter with their two young children, Frisky and the baby, having taken shelter in the loud-snoring Grandmother Chipmunk's house tree because their own nest offers too little protection from the storms. When Mrs. Bushy Tail discovers the cupboard nearly bare of acorns and pine-cones, Mr. Bushy Tail resolves to cross the frozen pond and travel through the woods to borrow corn or oats from either his cousin Red Squirrel or the Chipmunk family, despite his wife's fears that he will freeze or be blown away by the fierce wind. He promises to go only if the weather holds, and sets out the next clear morning, warmly dressed by his wife, carrying a bag for provisions. The journey proves easier than expected at first: Mr. Bushy Tail dines on wild rose-hips and reaches Red Squirrel's house tree by dark, only to find it empty; he eats a modest supper of stored acorns and dried apples and sleeps there alone. The next day he continues on to the Chipmunks', where he happily finds both the Chipmunk family and his cousin Red Squirrel's family visiting together. Mr. Chipmunk generously fills his bag with corn, oats, and dried peas. With threatening skies overhead, Bushy Tail declines to stay for dinner and hurries homeward, but a heavy snowstorm overtakes him. Blinded by the snow, he stumbles, falls, and lands—still clutching his precious bag—down a stranger's chimney into a bed of soft ashes, narrowly avoiding a lit fire. He finds himself in the underground tunnels of a mole's home and encounters Mrs. Mole, waking her from a nap. She welcomes him warmly and, after he declines her supper invitation out of urgency to reach his hungry family, guides him back up to the surface. There he emerges onto an open, treeless plain in the teeth of a raging North Wind, which promptly seizes him off his feet. Unable to resist, he is swept away for miles, drifting in and out of exhausted sleep as the storm carries him ever farther from home, his bag's string coming loose and spilling most of the food along the way. After a night and day of being blown across the world, Mr. Bushy Tail is finally set down—of all places—atop the South Pole, a tall wooden post where, by whimsical logic, the North Wind must stop or else become a South Wind. Warm and sunlit there, he thaws his frozen paws but despairs at being stranded far from his family with no obvious way down the smooth, towering post. A strange quilled creature on the ground below advises him to "try the middle course," and he discovers a hidden spiral staircase built into the center of the pole, which he descends into darkness. At the bottom he meets the staircase's owner, the self-styled "world famous Quilly Ant-Eater," a quill-covered creature who offers him ants for lunch, which Bushy Tail politely refuses. The Ant-Eader leads him to a lush, blooming southern wood full of nuts, where—because it is summer at the pole—Bushy Tail's heavy winter coat leaves him uncomfortably warm. Eager to get home before he "melts away entirely," he asks after a route north. His host doesn't know the way but directs him to a well-traveled friend, the fearsomely named Ring-Tailed Snorter. Following the directions, Bushy Tail finds the Ring-Tailed Snorter—a bizarre hybrid creature with a kangaroo's body, a monkey's head, and a long ringed tail worn in a bow-knot—perched on a tree trunk and producing an alarming noise it proudly calls "snortling." Despite his fright, the tactful Bushy Tail flatters the creature's performance and explains his plight. The Snorter offers to carry him partway on his back to a friend who can speed him home, dismissing the need to gather more nuts first by promising food along the whole route. Bushy Tail climbs on, clings to the Snorter's tail, and is bounced along in an odd leaping gait to the top of a high hill. There the Snorter departs abruptly as his "friend"—the gentle South Wind—arrives and whisks Bushy Tail away, this time far more pleasantly than his earlier ordeal. Over nearly a week of travel, the South Wind periodically sets him down in pleasant woods and meadows where he can eat, drink, and refill his bag with fine provisions. At last, one evening, the wind gently deposits him in his own home woods and blows on alone. Bushy Tail hurries home to find that spring has arrived in his absence—green shoots, flowers, and birdsong all around. He is joyously reunited with his family: his wife, who had given him up for dead after a terrible blizzard struck following his departure; his children, including Frisky, praised for his good behavior, and the baby, who has cut a new tooth and used it to accidentally bite Grandmother Chipmunk; and Grandmother Chipmunk herself. He learns that Mr. Chipmunk and Red Squirrel had come by afterward with more provisions, anxious over his prolonged absence, fearing him lost in the blizzard and buried in snow. That evening, Mrs. Bushy Tail cooks a fine supper from the bag's contents, and after the baby is tucked in, the family gathers by the fire while Mr. Bushy Tail, with Frisky on his knee, recounts his extraordinary journey—the chimney tumble, Mrs. Mole, the fierce North Wind, the South Pole, the Quilly Ant-Eater, and the Ring-Tailed Snorter—closing the tale as a happy, reunited family.
By Edith B. Davidson · First published 1910 · Genre: Children's Literature, Fantasy, Adventure · 8 chapters
Contents
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII