Picture 5
by Kitty the Great

Arabella had been born in the shelter and, until then, she had only ever seen cats and humans. However, when she arrived at her new home, there were lots of surprises in store for her. The biggest surprises were what she saw when she went to the window. The family that had adopted her lived in the countryside and there were lots of things happening outside the window. She saw birds of different kinds flying past and sometimes they would land in the garden, have a look around for any food, and then fly off again. Arabella loved the songs that some of the birds would sing. Sometimes, her humans would let her outside and she loved those times that she could get out and run around in the open and sniff the plants (of which there were many) in the garden. At the bottom of the garden was a six foot high fence, and Arabella loved to climb it. She loved the way that her claws could sink into it and she could almost run up the fence. When she was at the top, she could get onto the adjacent garden wall, and she loved to sit up there and just sunbathe. In her first year at the house, she saw some animals that she had never seen before. They looked a little like she did, but they were a bit smaller, and had bushy tails. Arabella watched what they did. The first time that she saw one of them, it was on the lawn and it looked as though it was looking for something. She could not see what it was looking for, then, it picked something up and started to eat it. Arabella thought that this was very strange behaviour. It was sitting up on it's hind legs and had hold of whatever it was eating, in it's front paws. Arabella had never done this, whilst eating, and thought that the creature looked very peculiar. Two of her humans came into the room and wondered what Arabella was looking at.

"Look, mum," said Wendy, "Arabella is watching a squirrel!" Arabella took a look around at her humans, and saw the fascinated look on their faces. "Oh, the squirrel ran away!" said the child. When Arabella looked back, the squirrel was gone. She watched for a long time, that day, but the squirrel did not come back.

The next day, Arabella watched for the squirrel again. This time, two of them came onto the lawn. She saw where they came from this time, it was from a tree, near the fence. Again they had food in their paws, that they had picked up from the lawn, and they were eating as she watched them. "What strange creatures you are," she thought. One of the squirrels must have suddenly decided that he had had enough to eat and turned and darted back towards the tree. Up and up he went, until he reached something that Arabella had thought was an untidy looking birds nest, near the top of the tree. The squirrel went inside. Arabella was amazed that the squirrels might live there. She was bursting to see what the squirrel's home was like inside. She was also anxious to get close to them and to talk with them. She was a well fed cat and had no desire to harm the squirrels at all. The other squirrel remained on the grass. Arabella went to the door and mewed to be let outside. She knew that as soon as one of the members of the family heard her, she would be let out. Wendy came to the door and opened it. "Off you go, Arabella, have fun out there," she said. Arabella went out and trotted immediately to the back lawn and towards the squirrel. The squirrel saw her and ran towards the tree, in which it lived. Not bothering to look round, the squirrel ran up the tree, just as quickly as it had moved across the ground. Arabella ran to the tree, she felt the texture of it, with her claws. It was made out to the same sort of stuff that the fence was made out of, she started to climb, quickly, and found it easy, her claws gripped into the wood and she ran up the tree. Higher and higher the squirrel went, and higher and higher went Arabella. She had never climbed so high before. She saw the squirrel in front of her heading towards it's little nest. She started to move along a branch, but it got thinner as she moved along it, soon she could only just balance on it and had to stop. The branch had started to bend with her weight on it, although it had hardly moved at all as the squirrels ran along it. She began to fear that she would fall.

The squirrels watched from high in the tree. They knew that if Arabella fell, she would probably not survive. It was very rare for a squirrel to fall from a tree, but, last autumn, a very old squirrel, called Knawer, who had become increasingly blind with old age, had been moving along a branch, which had been snapped off, just the day before, in a high wind. Knawer had moved through the tree mainly using his memory of where the branches led. He did not know that the last part of the branch was no longer there and did not slow his speed as he had approached the break. He had fallen from the tree, from a great height. They had gone down to the ground to see how he was, but Knawer did not move. After a few hours, one of the humans from the house had seen Knawer's little body on the ground. They had come to him, and buried him, near the foot of the tree. The squirrels knew that Arabella would probably die, as Knawer had done, if she fell. "It serves you right, cat," one of them shouted, "you should not have chased us. You probably wanted one of us for your dinner!" "No," Arabella replied, "I just wanted to talk to you, and I wanted to see what the inside of your house is like, I don't want to eat you. I don't kill things to eat, my humans give me lots of food, so I don't need to." The squirrels looked at one another. They believed Arabella, as they had seen her around in the garden, beneath them, and they had never seen her kill anything, even though she had sometimes had an opportunity to do so. They had only seen her watching the wildlife around her, and she seemed to have a particular fascination for the birds, although she had never harmed one of them.

Suddenly Arabella's back paws slipped from the swaying branch. She was only hanging on with her front claws. She would only be able to hang on for a minute or so, at the most, then she would fall to her death. Without warning, the cat felt little paws touching her hind legs, they were pulling them backwards and then she felt something solid under her back paws. It was another branch. She felt the branch coming up towards where her front legs were and she looked towards it. There were some squirrels scampering away from her, towards the trunk of the tree. There were six of them, and their combined weight had bent the branch down, near to her hind legs, so that they could reach her back paws and guide them towards a solid foothold. As the branch came alongside the one that her front paws were on, she moved her back paws across, so that she was facing towards the tree trunk and the squirrels. "Oh, thank you, so much," said Arabella, "I will always be your friend, if you will let me." "First, you have to get down to the ground, safely," said one of the squirrels. "You will need to come to the main body of the tree, then you will have to go down with your hind paws first, keep your body close to the tree trunk, spread your legs around the trunk a little and crawl backwards down to the ground. Go much more slowly than you did on the way up, or you may fall. Be very careful."

Arabella got to the ground, after what seemed like an age, to her. She moved away from the tree and the squirrels came down to talk to her. "The reason that we build our drey so high in the tree is so that we will be safe," one of them, who was called Skipper, said. "We know, now, that you would cause us no harm, but there are cats who would. If they could get there, they would kill us. You must never try to get to our drey again, it is our home and only squirrels are allowed there. If you try to get there again, you will be in great danger from falling. That is part of the defense of our home."

Arabella agreed to never try to get to the squirrels' house again. She became great friends with them. Sometimes, out of the window, she would see where nuts and fruit would fall. Occasionally, she would see that they had fallen in places where the squirrels might not see them, and she was able to direct them towards them. The squirrels, from their high vantage point, could see when any danger might be approaching, which they felt that they should warn Arabella about. They could see when any dogs came near the garden, or where there were any wasps, which might sting Arabella, if she were not careful. Their friendship was mutually beneficial to all of them and they were glad that they had become lifelong friends.