For two days the storm raged, and when the white flakes ceased to pile upon the hills and trees, a cutting blast arose that sent snow-horses riding across the fields and piled them up in drifts along the fences.

It made life harder for the Squirrel-Folk by hiding good Mother Earth from their hungry eyes; but in one way the wind served them, for it swept the snow from all the limbs that served the tree-folk as an over-way.

For two days the blizzard hissed. The third day it was very cold; on the fourth day Bannertail peeped forth on the changed white world. The wind, the pest of wild life in the trees, had ceased, the sky was clear, and the sun was shining in a weak, uncertain way. It evoked no enthusiasm in the Graycoat's soul. Not once did he utter his Sun-salute. He was stiff and sleepy, and a little hungry as he went forth. His hunger grew with the exercise of moving. Had he been capable of such thought he might have said: "Thank goodness the wind has swept the snow from the branches." He galloped and bounded from one high over-way to another, till a wide gap between tree-tops compelled him to descend. Over the broad forest floor of shining white he leaped, and made for the beloved hickory grove. Pine-cones furnish food, so do buds of elm and flower-buds of maple. Red acorns are bitter yet eatable, white acorns still better, and chestnuts and beechnuts delicious, but the crowning glory of a chosen feast is nuts of the big shag hickory—so hard of shell that only the strongest chisel teeth can reach them, so precious that nature locks them up in a strong-box of stone, enwrapped in a sole-leather case; so sought after, that none of them escape the hungry creatures of the wood for winter use, except such as they themselves have hidden for just such times. Bannertail quartered the surface of the snow among the silent bare-limbed trees, sniffing, sniffing, alert for the faintest whiff.

A hound would not have found it—his nose is trained for other game. Bannertail stopped, swung his keen "divining-rod," advanced a few hops, moved this way and that, then at the point of the most alluring whiff, he began to dig down, down through the snow.

Soon he was out of sight, for here the drift was nearly two feet deep. But he kept on, then his busy hind feet replacing the front ones as diggers for a time, sent flying out on the white surface brown leaves, then black loam. Nothing showed but his tail and little jets of leaf-mould. His whole arm's-length into the frosty ground did he dig, allured by an ever-growing rich aroma. At last he seized and dragged forth in his teeth a big fat hickory-nut, one buried by himself last fall, and, bounding with rippling tail up a tree to a safe perch that was man-high from the ground, he sawed the shell adroitly and feasted on the choicest food that is known to the Squirrel kind.

A second prowl and treasure-hunt produced another nut, a third produced an acorn, a visit to the familiar ever-unfrozen spring quenched his thirst, and then back he undulated through the woods and over the snow to his cosey castle in the oak.