Quest for the Faradawn - страница 20

Nearly every night Brock would crawl through the narrow passage into the bush and Nab would see two great white stripes appearing out of the gloom. They would then go out together and Brock would take him all round the wood looking for food. All the animals had told him what they ate and explained to him how to find it but Nab did not like the idea of killing his fellow animals and then eating their flesh, so his diet consisted of berries, fruits, toadstools (which he particularly liked), bark, grass and other plants of the wood. In the autumn he would go round the wood with Digit and the other squirrels collecting acorns, beechmast and the fragrant hazelnuts and these would be buried in one corner of his room to last the winter. He would also go with Bibbington the hedgehog to the dark damp places of the wood where the best toadstools grew and these would be gathered and hung all around the inside of the bush so that the air could circulate around them and they could dry for the winter. Bibbington told him to stay well clear of any white-gilled fungi because if he ate some types of those he would die a painful death, so he gathered only those which the hedgehog had assured him were good to eat: the yellow and ragged chanterelle with its delicate perfume and peppery flavour, the field and horse mushrooms which were his favourite and the oyster mushroom which grew in abundance on the old rotting silver birches in his part of the wood. Then there were shaggy caps, puffballs which Bibbington told him to ‘be sure and gather before the brown powder comes’ and boletus of all sorts which sprouted out of the decaying autumn leaves in their shiny oranges and dark browns and which the hedgehog had taught him to recognize by their tubelike gills and their smell. The dandelion provided him with both a vegetable all year round from its leaves and a root which, when dug up in the autumn, he could dry and use to add some variety to his winter diet. In spring he would rejoice in the abundance and variety of the new foods that were growing all around; the nutty flavour of the young hawthorn leaves, the slightly bitter wood-sorrel and the sweet young beech leaves which he would chew straight off the tree. He would also nibble the fresh young shoots of nettles and collect armfuls of the new season’s chickweed which, although he could gather it all the year round, always tasted better in spring. Sometimes he would scamper down to the big brook over the fields with Perryfoot and there they would spend the afternoon enjoying the nutty flavour of the young burdock stems which grew in profusion all along the banks and collecting watercress to take back and eat in the evening. Perryfoot had shown Nab another very useful plant which grew by the big brook in summer and which was always easily found by its scent; this was mint, which he used to add variety to the flavour of some of his more staple foods. It could also be dried if hung up and he would use this in the winter with his toadstools. Often he found large patches of meadowsweet in the same area as the mint and he gathered clumps to lay on the sleeping comer of his bush and to give to Tara for the sett. Ever since he had first been taken in and laid down on the pile of meadowsweet, he had found it difficult to sleep unless he had that fragrant scent in his nostrils.

A particular delight of late summer was to wander on a balmy evening with Brock and Tara to the blackberry bushes that grew round a hollow in the bank in the fields at the back of Silver Wood and to pick these juicy succulent fruits and eat them straight off the bush until they had had their fill. They would then sit for a while looking down on the wood while Brock told a story and the moon moved slowly through the sky.

There were other fruits which summer produced; rosehips, wild gooseberries and, a rare delicacy, wild raspberries. Sometimes, when the first leaves were beginning to turn brown and the smells of autumn began to linger in the air, Brock would take the boy off over the fields to a bank where bilberries grew and they would spend all night picking the delicate black berries off the small bushes and eating them. They would then gather as much as Nab could carry and take them back to surprise Tara who would ruffle the boy’s hair with her paw in delight.