The Night the Wind Moved Everybody

Once there was a squirrel named Pim who kept her nuts in rows.

Not in heaps, the way other squirrels do. In rows, by size, smallest on the left. She had a row of beechnuts, a row of acorns, and three rows of hazelnuts, because hazelnuts come in three sizes and Pim was not going to pretend otherwise. When she finished a row she would sit back on her heels and say, “Sorted,” in the happy way other animals say hooray, and then she would start the next one.

She lived in the wood where one road goes through, and every burrow along it has a painted door. Hers was yellow, and it was a big round one, because her burrow had been a badger’s once, and the hall goes back further than you would think. That autumn the trees had gone gold all at once, the way they do there, so that the whole wood looked lit from inside. The geese went over honking about the south. And somebody was burning apple wood down the road, and the smell of it came in under Pim’s yellow door every evening and made her worry.

Here is what Pim wished for, and you may think it is a small wish, but it was the whole of her heart that autumn. She wished to wake up on the first frost morning with her pantry exactly as she had left it. Every nut in its row. Nothing moved. Because then she could stop checking, and stop counting, and finally sleep the winter through.

And that is where the trouble was. Because in that wood, on the first frost night, the West Wind does the moving.

You have seen wind push leaves around. This is not that. The West Wind comes over the hill with a hat made of leaves on her head. She picks up every animal’s whole winter pantry, shelves and all, and carries it through the air to where it needs to go for the cold months. Root cellars, nut stores, crates of dried apple, one badger’s entire cupboard with the plates still in it. She has been doing it since the wood was young. She is very strong, she is very cheerful, and she sings while she works.

And the West Wind has never once read a label. She cannot read. Nobody ever taught her. Do not blame her for it; nobody taught you to carry a cupboard through the sky.

Pim, of course, did not know this. She had come over the hill in the spring, and nobody tells a new neighbor the important things until after. Pim believed in labels the way she believed in rows.

So on the last warm day she wrote a label. She wrote PIM’S, in neat letters, on a card, and hung it from the top shelf. Then she stood back and thought about the size of the wind and the size of the card.

The next morning she wrote a bigger one, on a piece of birch bark as wide as she was, and nailed it over the pantry door. PIM’S. PLEASE LEAVE.

And on the third day, the cold bright day before the frost, Pim got out her whole pot of yellow paint. She climbed up on a stump. And she wrote on the front of her house, on the door itself, in letters you could read from the road: THIS IS PIM’S. DO NOT MOVE.

“Sorted,” said Pim, and went to bed pleased, and slept for the first time in a month.

That night the frost came. And the West Wind came over the hill in her hat of leaves, humming, and she went along the road lifting the winter out of everybody’s house. And she has never once read a label. She took Pim’s shelves. She took Pim’s rows. She took the beechnuts and the acorns and all three sizes of hazelnut. And because the third label was painted on the door, she took the door too, on the grounds that it was clearly part of the set.

In their place she put down, very gently, forty armfuls of dry leaves, and one of the big brown blankets the West Wind keeps for animals who have not thought about it.

Pim woke to a leaf on her nose.

She dug. She swam. She came up through the leaves the way you come up through a lake. She looked around her empty burrow, at the mountain of leaves where her rows had been. And at a brown blanket. It went out of the door, along the path, and all the way down to the road, where somebody was going to have to roll up one end of it so the carts could get by.

“That,” said Pim, “is not sorted.”

She marched up the hill to Bram the bear’s cave to say so.

Bram was sitting in the middle of a hill of hazelnuts with his chin in his paws, with the beechnuts in a drift by the wall and the acorns halfway to the back, where it was driest. He was a large bear with a gentle face and no bed at all. In September the other animals had asked him whether he’d gathered his leaves yet. “The Wind will sort it out,” Bram had said, and gone back to sleep in the sun.

“Pim,” he said sadly. “I can’t chew these. Look.” He put one in his mouth and it went tik against his tooth and he took it out again. “I’ve been at it since dawn. I’ve eaten four.”

“Those are my medium hazelnuts,” said Pim, “and you have mixed them with the small ones.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bram.

“You have my door,” said Pim.

“It’s a very nice door,” said Bram.

So they fetched the wheelbarrow, because that is what you do. They piled it high with hazelnuts and turned it down the hill. And then, halfway down, the barrow hit a root and went over sideways. Leaves went up in a great gold puff. Nuts went rolling off into the ditch in every direction, hundreds of them, unsorted, unsortable, gone.

Bram sat down in the road and laughed until he had to hold his stomach. And Pim opened her mouth to be furious, and found she was laughing too, which surprised her more than the wind had.

Then she stopped and looked back up at the cave.

“Bram,” she said. “Nothing in your cave is damp. Not one nut.”

“It never is,” said Bram. “It’s a good cave. Bit drafty.”

And Bram looked down the hill at Pim’s burrow. Round, and deep, and out of the wind, and stuffed to the ceiling with the warmest leaves he had ever been given. He thought about how cold a cave is when you sleep on stone.

They did not move anything back.

They spent the afternoon carrying the rest of the leaves down to Pim’s, which was much easier than carrying them up. They hung Pim’s yellow door back on Pim’s yellow doorframe. And they left every last nut safe and dry in the cave, where Pim could fetch one whenever she wanted, and count all the way up the hill and back if she felt like counting. The blanket they rolled up at the road end, and dragged the rest of it inside, and it still reached every corner of the burrow, which is exactly what a blanket should do.

The dark came early, the way it does then. Outside, the frost put its white fur on the grass.

Bram came in the way bears come in, backwards and apologizing, and lay down in the leaves, and there was exactly enough room and no more. Pim tucked herself into the crook of his arm with one hazelnut set by for the morning, because she liked to know where breakfast was.

“Pim,” said Bram, mostly asleep. “Is it sorted?”

“It is sorted,” said Pim.

And away over the hill, the West Wind was humming her way toward the next wood in her hat of leaves, very pleased with herself.

The end.