The Squirrel Who Kept All the Acorns

Nutkin the squirrel loved acorns more than anything. Every day she scurried through the forest, gathering every acorn she could find, until her hollow tree was stuffed from floor to ceiling. When her friend Pip the mouse came looking for just one acorn to get through the cold months, Nutkin shook her head. "These are mine," she said. "I found them first."

All autumn, Nutkin kept gathering, and all autumn her pile grew. She barely noticed the other animals watching her with worried eyes, wondering how they would manage when the snow came.

Then winter arrived, hard and white, and it lasted longer than anyone expected. Nutkin sat inside her tree surrounded by more acorns than she could ever eat alone. But the days were long and lonely. No one visited. No one waved from the path below. She had all the food in the forest and no one to share a meal with.

One bitter morning, she heard a small, tired voice outside. It was Pip, thin and shivering, too weak to dig for the few acorns he had buried himself. Nutkin looked at her enormous pile, then at her cold, hungry friend, and felt something shift inside her chest.

She carried acorn after acorn out to Pip, and then to the rabbits down the hill, and then to the sleepy old hedgehog by the stream. One by one, her neighbors came out of their burrows, surprised and grateful. Soon her hollow tree was nearly empty — but it was full of visitors instead, laughing and telling stories together through the rest of the winter.

When spring finally came, Nutkin had fewer acorns saved than any squirrel in the forest. But she had more friends than she had ever had before, and every single one of them remembered her kindness when autumn came around again.

The following year, when the first cold winds began to blow, Nutkin did not wait for anyone to ask. She set aside a little pile for herself, and started delivering the rest before winter even arrived, so no one would ever go hungry waiting for her to notice. The other animals began doing the same for each other, and the whole forest went into that winter warmer, fuller, and far less lonely than the one before.

Moral: What you share comes back to you as friendship, and friendship keeps you warmer than any pile of acorns ever could.