At last there came a crisis. Walnut and I had taken advantage of the quiet of the midday hour—the men being at their dinner—to steal out and get some beech-mast, when suddenly a missile of some sort hissed just above my head, cutting away a twig close above. I paused an instant in utter amazement, for I had heard no report, when—ping! another bullet whacked on the bark close below my feet, and there was a brute of a boy in corduroys, his head peering from behind a trunk, and in the very act of stretching the elastic of a heavy catapult. One quick bark to Walnut, and we were both away as hard as we could lay legs to the branches. A third buckshot whizzed close behind my brush as I fled. The boy, seeing us run, at once followed and began positively showering shot after us. It was impossible to reach home under the bombardment, and if we had not been lucky enough to find a knot-hole in a beech just large enough to shelter the two of us, one or other—both, perhaps—would have been maimed or killed. This was the last straw. For some days a vague resolution had been forming slowly in my brain. That night, as we crouched, almost too hungry to sleep, in our oak-tree home, I told Walnut we could stay there no longer, but must leave the coppice where we had so long sheltered. He seemed rather to like the idea than otherwise, being young and ready for adventure. Very early next morning I slipped across to the old beech and told my mother. I was anxious that she and the others should accompany us, but this she would not do. ‘No, Scud; I am too old to leave my home. I shall stay here and take my chances. But you, I think, are wise to go. Waste no time in getting off, for you must be well away before the men come to their work.’ A few minutes later Walnut and I had crossed the road and were hastening away across an open field bound due north. We went that way because we could go no other—a squirrel migrating invariably travels north. I do not know the reason, but some instinct implanted in us ages and ages ago, perhaps even before men began to walk erect, tells us to do so, and we obey it, and shall obey it, thousands of years hence. In just the same way the Norwegian lemmings march in their myriads towards the sea, and are drowned in the salt waves in a vain, instinctive effort to reach some place that has long disappeared beneath the waves. I cannot tell you all our wanderings or the perils that we encountered by the way. Twice Walnut was very nearly caught by a weasel; once a wide-winged hen sparrow-hawk came whistling down out of the blue as we were crossing an open field, and we escaped only by a happy accident into an old drain-tile which happened to lie near by. In this narrow refuge we both squeezed our trembling bodies until the bird of prey had departed in disgust.