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Updated: May 18, 2025
Then they knew him, and fell down in dread, but he took no revenge. Catching up great bowlders he tossed them around as easily as if they had been beechnuts, and at last, lifting the balanced rock, he placed it lightly where it stands to-day, gave them a caution against ill manners and hasty judgments, and resumed his slender form.
The beautiful wanderers flew like the winds in flocks of millions from climate to climate in accord with the weather, finding their food acorns, beechnuts, pine-nuts, cranberries, strawberries, huckleberries, juniper berries, hackberries, buckwheat, rice, wheat, oats, corn in fields and forests thousands of miles apart.
It was not a bear shaking down the ripe beechnuts not heavy enough for that, yet too heavy for the feet of any prowler of the woods to make on his stealthy hunting. Pr-r-r-r-ush, swish! thump!
Then he gave Sandy a small handful of beechnuts. Sandy Chipmunk ate them right on the spot. And he began to feel very happy. He had noticed that Uncle Sammy tossed the ear of corn into a basket which stood beneath the table. And the basket was full of corn. Sandy could reach it just as easily from the front of the table as Uncle Sammy could from behind it.
One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts, hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken them, and the colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright October day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is nothing quite so exhilarating as going nutting.
But he gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine and the eglantine and the blue harebell; he picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry, the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries, and fox-grapes; he brought home armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel and the wild honeysuckle; he dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint; he gnawed the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which he called "brake," which he pulled up, and found that the soft end "tasted good;" he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, though he could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was his melancholy duty to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold-thread, the tansy, and the loathsome "boneset; " and he laid in for the winter, like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts.
The beechnuts are already falling in the forest, and the swine are beginning to search for them while yet the harvest lingers. The nuts are formed by midsummer, and now, the husk opening, the brown angular kernel drops out. Many of the husks fall, too; others remain on the branches till next spring. Under the beeches the ground is strewn with the mast as hard almost to walk on as pebbles.
"He must have found a beech tree." Soon Turkey Proudfoot decided to join Johnnie Green. He hoped that beechnuts were more plentiful beneath Johnnie's tree. So Turkey Proudfoot picked his way slowly through the underbrush. And guided by the thump-thump-thump which once in a while boomed upon his ears, at last Turkey Proudfoot came into a little clearing.
"I don't see how such a little fellow as you can eat such hard things as acorns and beechnuts," protested Peter a little doubtfully. Yank-Yank laughed right out. "Sometime when I see you over in the Green Forest I'll show you," said he. "When I find a fat beechnut I take it to a little crack in a tree that will just hold it; then with this stout bill of mine I crack the shell.
Beechnuts and acorns were gathered in the autumn, the children at this time earning fully the right of home and food, and the stores were heaped in granaries dug into the cave's sides.
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