Beasts of New York | Page 2

hour on that day, very early on a winter
morning, the Center Kingdom was almost abandoned -- but soon spring
would come, and the city would bloom into a thriving maelstrom of life
and activity. All Patch needed to do, until that blessed time arrived, was
find enough food for these last few days of winter.
He saw in the distance, near the edge of the densely wooded area he
called home, a jagged rock outcropping from his memory book. He was
so hungry he paused only a moment to check for dangers before racing
headfirst down the tree trunk and towards the rocks. In his memory that

same outcropping was just there -- and the nearest human mountain
visible over the treetops to the west was there -- and a particular maple
tree, which had been covered in orange and scarlet leaves on the day
Patch buried the acorn, had been exactly there, and that far away.
Patch found his way to the exact spot where all those landmarks fell
into place, so that the place where he stood and the page from his
memory book matched perfectly, like a picture and its tracing. Then he
began to sniff. He knew as an undeniable fact that in the autumn he had
buried an acorn within a tail-length of where he stood. And squirrels
can smell perfume in a hurricane, or a dog a half-mile upwind, or a
long-buried acorn.
But Patch smelled nothing but grass, and earth, and normal air-smells.
His heart fell. It seemed to fall all the way into his paws and seep out
through the tips of his claws. Patch let out a little murmur of awful
disappointment. There was no food here. This acorn was gone, already
gone.
This was not unusual. Squirrels often found and ate nuts buried by
other squirrels. But the same thing had happened with every nut Patch
had tried to unearth for the last two days. And that was unusual. It was
such an astonishing run of bad luck that Patch had never heard of such
a thing happening before.
He dug anyway, hoping that maybe this acorn had no smell, or his nose
was not working right. But he found nothing. And when he found the
next burial place, again there was nothing. He ran to the next; and the
next; until finally there were no more pictures left in Patch's book of
memories, no nuts left to try to unearth. And he was so hungry.
By this time other squirrels too had emerged from their dreys and were
digging for food. Patch knew all of the half-dozen squirrels he could
see around him, and the dozen more whose presence he could smell in
the cold wind. They were all of his tribe.
Squirrels are social animals, they have family and friends, clans and

tribes and kingdoms. Patch's tribe, the squirrels of the Treetops, were
not like the Meadow tribe who lived near the city's grassy plains, or the
Ramble tribe that inhabited its rockiest wilderness, or the red Northern
tribe. The Treetops tribe was more a group of individuals than a
community. If they had had a motto, it would have been, "Take care of
yourself." None of the squirrels around Patch were of his clan. It would
have been a terribly low and shameful thing for Patch to go to one of
them and ask for even a single bite of an acorn. But while pride is
important, it cannot be eaten, and hunger is more important still. Patch
was so hungry he would have begged for food.
But there was no one to beg from. For not a single one of the squirrels
around him had found a nut this morning. All of them had been digging
for nothing.
Patch sat and thought.
He was, you must remember, a squirrel, an animal, a creature of
instinct. Thinking did not come naturally to him. He had to sit for a
long time while he thought, in a little fenced-in patch of grass near to
one of the concrete-wasteland human trails. Around him there was little
to see. In winter most birds flew south, rats stayed underground,
raccoons hibernated. There were only the other hungry squirrels, a few
fluttering pigeons, and the occasional passing human.
At one point an unleashed dog came near, and Patch had to interrupt his
thinking to watch this threat. It was a very strange dog. If it was indeed
a dog at all. It looked like a dog, but it was unaccompanied by any
human, and it had a rich, feral scent like that of no other dog Patch had
ever encountered. The dog-thing said nothing, which was also unusual,
but it watched Patch with a leery grin full of sharp teeth for what felt