Chapter 21

ONE WAY TO KEEP WARM

After making his strange wish about his eighteen cousins--that they would sleep straight through the winter--Dickie Deer Mouse crawled out of bed. The sleepers filled the chamber so full that Dickie had to step into the hall before he could stretch himself.

For some reason he seemed to feel unusually stretchy. Generally when he waked up he sprang up at once and dashed out of his house, to find something to eat. But now he had half a mind to go back to bed again.

He did not do that, however, because he wanted to get away from his unwelcome guests for a time. So he crept through his long hall and crawled out through his front door, into the world above.

To Dickie's great surprise a startling change had come over the pasture. The weather had cleared while he slept and the stars twinkled in the heavens above him. And the hillside pasture was white with a thick blanket of snow.

It was cold, too--much colder than it had been when Dickie went to sleep.

Luckily a crust had formed upon the snow--a crust that was just strong enough to support Dickie's weight. And he made swiftly for the spruce woods, to hunt for his supper, for he knew he could find nothing on the ground, covered as it was by the snow.

Dickie felt even hungrier than he usually did when starting out of an evening to look for something to eat. But that was not strange, for without knowing it, he had slept several days and nights in the snug chamber with his cousins.

Dickie did not stay out all night long. Yet he took time, before he went home, to hide a small store of spruce seeds in a hollow rail of the pasture fence. He knew that before the long winter came to an end he would find that food in the woods would grow alarmingly scarce.

Long before daybreak Dickie Deer Mouse was glad to return to the underground chamber. And as he crept into the crowded room he thought it the coziest home he had ever had. He knew, at last, what made the place so warm. The soft, round bodies of his eighteen cousins heated it almost as well as if he had had a real stove.

It was lucky for him, after all, that Fatty Coon had told them about Dickie's new house. And now Dickie only hoped that none of them would leave before spring.

That snowstorm proved to be only the first warning of winter. In a few days the weather grew quite warm again. And to Dickie's dismay the three families of cousins waked up and went out of doors to get the air, and gather seeds and such thin-shelled nuts as they could find.

They did not eat all that they picked up. Like Dickie Deer Mouse, they stored some of the food in secret nooks and crannies, against a time of need.

That first early snowstorm had been a good thing for the dwellers in the underground chamber. It had warned them that winter was coming. And during the weeks that passed before the whole countryside became