Elsie had been asleep for a couple of days at that point. This was how it often was in the winter. She never slept straight through; she would drift in and out, waking up if something happened or she got hungry and then falling into dreams again for a few days, or a week or two. This time she had been dreaming of being together again as a family: Elbert and her, cracking acorns and watching the kits chase each other around the moss.
“Ma. Ma!” She smiled in her sleep.
“Ma! Wake up, it’s Emma! The owls told us you were here. We were worried sick!” She felt a paw prodding at her haunch. Gradually she sifted her dream apart from what she was hearing and feeling and emerged from winter sleep as if from a pile of leaves.
“Ma, it’s us!” And through her blurry eyes she saw her kits, Emma and Edwin—not kits anymore of course, but grown up. And behind them, a half dozen other tufty squirrel heads poking into the opening of the owls’ burrow in the old spruce—Emma and Edwin’s partners, and their kits.
“Well, I’ll be!” And then she threw her paws around Emma’s neck. “You’re all right! I was so worried about you with the train coming through the west wood!”
“The west wood?” Edwin was perplexed. “Ma, we haven’t lived in that wood for two years! We’ve been across the west brook in the oak forest on the Beringford estate.”
“Oh my goodness!” Elsie was feeling her daughter over with her paws. She was sleek, plump, strong. “Oh my goodness!” She cried. “What are you doing here?”
“The robin told us you wanted us,” said Emma.
“The robin?”
“Didn’t you send it?” Edwin asked, but now he was being swarmed with his kits, who had their arms wrapped around his neck and were peeking out from behind his fabulous tail and were asking if this was their grandmother. “Say hello,” Edwin prompted. “This is your Grandma Elsie.”
“Oh my goodness!” Elsie held out her paws. “Come here, come here all of you. Aren’t you beautiful!” And she was introduced to Camille and Forest and Archie and Beth and Honoré. And she kissed her son-in-law Jack and daughter-in-law Arabella.
When everyone had settled down a bit and the kits were snoozing after their long, dangerous run across the brook and over the fields in the first part of the morning when the foxes were to bed and the hawks weren’t up yet, and Arabella and Jack were off to see what could be found in the way of mushrooms, Edwin asked his mother again about the robin. “You didn’t send it? It said, ‘I’m here to tell you your mother Elsie wants you to come to the north wood as quick as ever you can.’”
“Well, it was certainly true I was worried about you, and I wanted to see you,” Elsie murmured, “but I didn’t send the robin. I know the one you’re talking about: I’ve seen it lately here in the wood. It was leading the girl Violet from the village about the old fae how, the girl who saved me from her dog, and even speaking with her in a strange tongue.”
“How odd!” Emma said. “I wonder why it told us to come so quickly.”
“I don’t know,” said Elsie. And she started to say, and it isn’t the best time, either, with the men stomping about looking for timber to cut for their train. But she didn’t say it. Because it felt like she was back in her dream again, and she didn’t want it to stop. So, she just squeezed Emma’s paw between hers. “But I’m so happy you’re here.”
The Rookery 