Chapter 5

While winter still had such cold weather that Tree Topper Clive didn't know whether he had goosebumbs or boosegumps, Clive did realise however that he did not like the winter time, and maybe as a squirrel he wasn't meant to. For now it was o.k. to stay in Pixie Pod's mushroom house but he didn't want to put Pixie Pod out every time the wintertime came along.

Maybe if when the wintertimecame by, I grew more skinfluff, like as if it were a jumper, or perhaps twere a way of not being a squirrel, even in the wintertime; thought Clive. These were all very silly thoughts really, when the obvious solution would be to stop roaming the trees and settle down. “I could live in a mushroom house, but . . .”, he said to himself, “it could only make me think I was a pixie, and I couldn't live in a nest for I'm not a bird and I don't want to think that neither”. Tree Topper Clive had the whole of the rest of the winter to think up a suitable sort of a warm spot for the next winter so he wouldn't get the cold goosebumps, or was that it? The more Tree Topper Clive dreamt of a place to call home, the more he wished for a home to become his place.

Tree Topper Clive tried on a few occasions to go back and find the talking tree, but by now, none of the trees had any green spikey things growing from them. So it was quite impossible to tell which tree it was which talked instead of growing the green spikey things. Today, however, the ever watching squirrel was off in search of a home instead of a tree, and not specifically a home which talked. Clive looked like a squirrel full of hot air, as he left the mushroom house with Pixie Pod's big wooly jumper on. He bounced from tree to tree, each bounce meaning the last place wasn't suitable enough to live as a squirrel.