The Squirrel's Winter Store

Chiku the squirrel lived in a hollow of an old neem tree. All autumn he gathered nuts and seeds. He counted them every night: forty groundnuts, twelve walnuts and a heap of seeds.

"Mine, mine, all mine," he sang, patting the pile.

When his neighbour, a bulbul, asked for one small seed, Chiku shook his head. "Winter is long. I cannot spare even one."

Winter came with cold fog. One night there was a tapping at the hollow. A tiny warbler stood outside, wet and shivering. She had flown all the way from the mountains and lost her flock in the fog.

"Please," she said. "Just until morning."

Chiku looked at his pile. He looked at the shivering bird. His store had forty groundnuts, but his hollow had only one voice in it, and that was his own.

"Come in," he said gruffly. He pushed three seeds towards her. Then, after a moment, a walnut.

The warbler ate, fluffed her feathers and began to tell him about the mountains: snow as white as milk, rivers that sang, flowers bigger than his head. Chiku forgot to count his nuts that night.

She stayed until the fog lifted. By then Chiku's pile was smaller, and his evenings were full of stories.

In spring the warbler flew north. Chiku felt the hollow go quiet again.

But a week later he found a strange, sweet seed at his door. And the next week, another. All summer the birds flying south left him small gifts from far away, because a little warbler had told everyone about the kind squirrel in the neem tree.