  Now as anyone understands who knows much about meadow mice, they nest on the ground, and they are the one kind of game a bear can always count on when the roots and berries are all gone and the trout streams frozen. Once upon a time, ever and ever so many thousands of years ago, there was a mouse who was wiser than the rest. When bears and bobcats pursued her, she took refuge in the tree tops. One night it seemed as if every creature in the woods was after her, and when she had reached the snug crotch of a high limb where she could hide from them, she decided it was wiser to stay there all night. The next morning for breakfast she sampled the bark, and to her surprise, found the flavor first rate. Then she began to ask herself why she need ever come down at all. She trilled for her mate, for she had a sweet little birdlike voice when she sang, and they discussed the situation. They had just been thinking of building a nest where the babies would be safe when they came, and they finally decided to build it away up high in the tree. Those babies, after having grown up in the tree top, saw no reason why they should go back to the ground either, and they too built homes in the tree tops, so high that bears and bobcats never thought of looking for them there. Where before they had eaten grass and other things that they could find on the ground, now they nibbled bark and spruce fans, and the tender butt ends of the pine needles. That way the whole tribe came to live in trees. Their relatives who had stayed on the ground all got caught, and there were only the families of those who had become arboreal. Now their neighbors were birds and squirrels, and when they wanted to go exploring, they could run out along one branch till it crossed the branch of another tree. In time Mother Nature changed their little furry coats from the gray-brown of the soil to the red-brown of the Oregon tree trunks, so that their enemies could not see them when they crouched along the limbs. She changed their teeth to stronger ones that could gnaw the bark more easily, and she gave them the kind of eyes that can see in the dark, because when the pretty little fellows went to feeding among the greenery, their rufous coats showed up too plainly by daylight. Finally, their Great Mother found that they needed longer tails than they had on the ground to help them keep their balance when they had to leap from branch to branch. And after Mother Nature had done all that for them, they found that they were so safe that they could build great, roomy nests in the very tree tops where they could raise their children. Sometimes they found an abandoned squirrel’s nest that made a first rate framework, and converted it into a palace of many rooms. These they carpeted beautifully with cedar fans and bits of dry moss and lichen for the babies to creep around on. The young bachelor mice were generally satisfied with one-room cabins away out on the tips of the limbs where they could come and go as they pleased, but as the young people became more experienced in nest building, and as they found that they needed larger quarters, they would often build a whole colony of nests around some tree trunk, with the different apartments resting on different branches, but with one main hallway that ran around the trunk so that they could visit back and forth without going out of doors. As the dust blew over these nests of sticks and spruce fans, and the rain moistened the dust, and the seeds of tiny plants blew on this rich soil, the apartment house would come to look like a bit of the ground beneath, and on cold nights the thick walls would keep out the rain and the wind and make it all as snug and homelike as anything you can imagine. That is how Mr. and Mrs. Tree Mouse came to be living so high above the ground, in the branches of this great pine tree. They really preferred spruce, because the bark has a better flavor, and, too, because most of their friends lived in the spruce trees; but when Douglas, the squirrel, had abandoned this great, roomy nest, it had seemed like too good a bargain to let go, and they had promptly moved in. They were really awfully frightened when they saw Chinook come scrambling so near, for they had heard him tell Douglas how he would eat him alive if he ever caught him. The pretty little red mother mouse had just gotten her four babies asleep when Chinook finished his nap, and with a yawn and a stretch, began looking about him to see where he was. Now was the time for Father Tree Mouse to distract his attention, for any moment, the cub might start investigating the nest. With a high-pitched little squeak, the brave mite started to run along the limb just below, but he scuttled so fast that Chinook decided it was no use trying to catch him, and just sat there blinking sleepily in the sunshine. At that, Father Tree Mouse came back, and this time he pretended to have a broken leg, which made him limp along so slowly that even Chinook might have caught him. Just barely out of reach of the little bear’s barbed paw, Father Tree Mouse limped down the tree trunk and out along the limb. This time the cub ran after him so fast that Father Mouse’s heart thumped with terror. But he must get that bear clear out of their tree, and at last he dropped to the ground and raced madly across an open space to another tree, with Chinook close at his heels. His ruse was working altogether too well, for the little bear all but clapped his paw on him once. He did get the tip of his long tail. But Father Tree Mouse remembered a knothole he had seen one day when out exploring, and straight for that knothole he darted, tumbling into it not an instant too soon. For a time Chinook watched the knothole for him to come out, but by and by his mother called him, and when he came back, Father Tree Mouse had left and gone back home.
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