Kids & Fables

by Scribes Stories · 3 min read · 1 view

The Squirrel Who Saved Too Much Genre: Kids and Fable Nutmeg the squirrel was, by general agreement of the whole forest, the most prepared squirrel anyone had ever known. While the other squirrels gathered just enough acorns to see them through winter, Nutmeg gathered twice that, then three times, then so many that her hollow tree groaned under the weight of her hoarded stores. "You can't possibly need all of that," said her neighbor Pip, watching her drag yet another sack of acorns up the trunk. "Winter is unpredictable," Nutmeg said, the way she said every time anyone questioned her. "Better to have too much than too little." The forest animals shrugged and let her be, the way you let a neighbor keep their strange habits, right up until the winter came harder and longer than anyone had prepared for. The snow fell for eleven days straight, burying every acorn the other squirrels had carefully stored, and one by one, families began knocking on Nutmeg's door, hungry and cold and hoping for help. Nutmeg opened her door, looked at her towering piles of acorns, and felt something twist uncomfortably in her chest. "I need these," she said, mostly to herself. "I don't know how long the winter will last." But the knocking continued, gentle and patient, families with hungry children, an elderly hedgehog who could no longer forage for himself, a young rabbit whose parents hadn't made it home before the storm hit. And slowly, reluctantly, Nutmeg began handing out small handfuls, then larger ones, watching her towering piles shrink day by day as the winter dragged endlessly on. By the time spring finally arrived, Nutmeg's stores were completely empty, every single acorn given away to someone who'd needed it more urgently than her own uncertain fears about the future. "I suppose I'll starve now instead," she said gloomily to Pip, expecting the worst, since her own stores had been the only thing standing between comfort and hunger for weeks. But Pip only smiled and gestured toward the forest edge, where dozens of animals were approaching, each one carrying something small. The hedgehog brought mushrooms he'd finally been strong enough to forage again. The rabbit family brought fresh greens from their garden. Families she barely knew brought berries, nuts, whatever they could spare, each one insisting Nutmeg take it, because they remembered exactly who had kept them fed through the worst of the winter. "I don't understand," Nutmeg said, staring at the growing pile of gifts in front of her hollow tree. "I gave away everything I saved." "That's exactly why," Pip said gently. "You spent years hoarding more than you needed, worried about a winter that might never come. But when it finally did come, you didn't hoard at all. You gave until there was nothing left. Turns out the forest remembers that kind of thing." Nutmeg looked at the pile of shared food, more varied and more generous than anything her careful hoarding had ever produced, and understood something she hadn't quite grasped in all her years of careful, anxious saving. "I think I was preparing for the wrong thing all along," she said slowly. "I was so busy preparing for scarcity that I never once prepared for community." From that winter on, Nutmeg still gathered acorns, because preparation was, admittedly, a sensible habit for a squirrel to keep. But she gathered only what she needed, and shared generously whenever the forest asked, and found, to her genuine surprise, that she slept far more peacefully with a modest store and good neighbors than she ever had with towering piles and a locked door. "Better to have enough and share it," she told her own children years later, "than to have too much and guard it alone. The forest takes care of those who take care of the forest first."