squirrel, to kill the young; or driving away his little cousin,
the chipmunk, to steal his hoarded nuts; or watching every fight
that goes on in the woods, jeering and chuckling above it,--then
you begin to understand the Indian legend.

Spite of his evil ways, however, he is interesting and always
unexpected. When you have watched the red squirrel that lives
near your camp all summer, and think you know all about him, he
does the queerest thing, good or bad, to upset all your theories
and even the Indian legends about him.

I remember one that greeted me, the first living thing in the
great woods, as I ran my canoe ashore on a wilderness river.
Meeko heard me coming. His bark sounded loudly, in a big spruce,
above the dip of the paddles. As we turned shoreward, he ran down
the tree in which he was, and out on a fallen log to meet us. I
grasped a branch of the old log to steady the canoe and watched
him curiously. He had never seen a man before; he barked, jeered,
scolded, jerked his tail, whistled, did everything within his
power to make me show my teeth and my disposition.

Suddenly he grew excited--and when Meeko grows excited the woods
are not big enough to hold him. He came nearer and nearer to my
canoe till he leaped upon the gunwale and sat there chattering,
as if he were Adjidaumo come back again and I were Hiawatha. All
the while he had poured out a torrent of squirrel talk, but now
his note changed; jeering and scolding and curiosity went out of
it; something else crept in. I began to feel, somehow, that he
was trying to make me understand something, and found me very
stupid about it.