Mabel and the Slow Oak

In the middle of a wood there stood an oak so old that nobody could remember it being young. Every fall it dropped its acorns, thousands of them, and every fall the squirrels ran about and buried them for the winter.

The busiest squirrel of all was Mabel. This fall Mabel had buried nine hundred acorns. She had put them ten to a hole, because she was sure ninety holes would be easier to remember than nine hundred. And every time she patted a hole flat, she said to herself, “Now, this one I will remember.”

You can guess how that went. Nine hundred acorns in ninety holes, and not one of those holes stayed in Mabel’s head for longer than it took to wash her paws.

Then the first frost came, and the last leaves came down, and the sky went the flat white color that means snow. Mabel sat at the foot of the old oak with her empty tummy and her empty cheeks, and she said, “Oh, what am I going to do?”

And the oak said, “Mabel.”

Now, there are two things you should know about that oak.

The first is that an old oak’s roots go out under the whole wood, and it can feel every acorn in the ground, the way you can feel your own toes inside your socks. The oak had felt Mabel dig every one of her ninety holes. It knew exactly where they were. They were its acorns, after all.

The second is that the oak could talk, but only at the speed of a tree. One word took it an hour at the very least, and often a good deal more. A whole sentence took all afternoon. Last spring it had started to say something about the weather. It had got as far as “It... looks... like...” and then stopped to think. It was still thinking.

It took the oak three whole days to set out its bargain. I will tell it to you quickly, the way Mabel would have liked it.

The oak would tell her where her holes were, one at a time. But only every other hole. The ones in between she must leave in the ground, however hungry she got. The last three words took a whole morning by themselves:

“Every. Other. One.”

Mabel did not ask why. She was hungry, and “why” can take a tree a week. She said yes at once. She said it so quickly that the oak missed it, and she had to press her nose to the bark and say it again, very slowly, before it got through.

The next day, the directions began.

At breakfast the oak said, “Mabel.” It always started with her name. It seemed to like saying it.

Mabel sat up very straight. She tied a blade of grass around her tail, to remind herself of something important, and she waited.

In the middle of the morning the oak said, “Under.”

Around lunchtime it said, “the.”

The sun came through the branches and lay warm across the roots. Mabel’s eyes grew heavy. She told herself she would rest them only until the next word.

She woke at teatime, just in time to hear the oak say, “stone.”

Mabel looked at the grass tied around her tail. She could not think what it was for. (It was for staying awake.)

“Under the what stone?” she said.

There are a great many stones in a wood. The oak did not sigh. It did not know how, and it was fond of her besides. It simply began again, and an hour later it said, “Blue.”

Under the blue stone were ten acorns, fat and brown, exactly where she had left them and forgotten them. Mabel ate one sitting on the stone, and it was the best acorn she had ever tasted.

And that is how the winter went. Under the blue stone. Behind the fallen birch. Two hops past the badger’s back door. Each place took the oak most of a day to say, and Mabel learned to sit close, doze between the words, and wake up for the important ones. She never did remember what the grass on her tail was for. She tied on a fresh blade every morning, just in case.

Some days she was so hungry that her paws itched to dig anywhere at all. Then she said to herself, very fast, “Every other one, every other one,” and kept her paws still.

Then came the deep of winter. The snow was up to the badger’s back door. The oak’s words came slower than ever in the cold. And one grey morning Mabel was hungrier than she had ever been. She was scraping at the snow without really thinking, the way your hand finds the cookie jar, when her paw closed on something round and hard.

An acorn. A good fat one. And under it, nine more.

This was not a place the oak had told her. This was one of the in-between holes.

Mabel held that acorn for a long time. She held it while the snow landed on her ears. She held it until her paws went cold.

Then she said, not fast at all this time, “Every other one.”

And she put the acorn back with the other nine, and patted the earth down flat, and pushed the snow over it, and went home hungry.

Mabel forgot a great many things that winter. She did not forget that.

The oak, of course, had felt the whole thing through its roots. The next morning it said, “Mabel.” An hour later it said, “Good.” And then, word by slow word, it told her the way to the holly bush. Ten acorns were waiting there, and she was eating them by teatime.

The oak kept its side of the bargain all winter long, and Mabel kept hers.

Then the snow went away, and in spring the old oak finally finished its sentence about the weather.

“Rain,” it said.

It was right, too. It rained all that week, soft and warm, and the rain went down into the ground and woke up everything sleeping there.

One morning Mabel came down the trunk and stopped halfway.

All over the wood, little green oak shoots had come up out of the ground, in bunches of ten. There was a bunch in every single place she had not dug. Every acorn she had left alone had done what an acorn does when nobody eats it.

But here is the part that made Mabel sit down.

All winter, under the snow, those acorns had lain in the ground and listened to the old oak through its roots. They had heard it say one word more than any other. And now each little shoot, in its tiny, slow, brand-new voice, was saying the only word it knew so far.

“Maaa... bel,” said the shoots by the stream, and the shoots at the edge of the meadow.

“Maaa... bel,” said the ten little shoots in the place where a hungry squirrel had once held an acorn in the snow for a very long time, and put it back.

Mabel sat on the root of the old oak and listened to her own name coming up out of the ground, slow and green, all over the wood.

She never did learn to remember where she put things. She never found out what the grass was for. But she was the only squirrel there has ever been with a whole wood that knew her name.