A dormouse goes through a great deal of stress when putting on his trousers. The trouble is simply that his feet are too far apart. Every dormouse in existence believes they are the sole dormouse with perfect technique for trouser-donning. None more so than Wilbur Fiddle.
But it never seemed to get any easier.
Wilbur laid his well-worn trousers on the floor, and gathered the individual legs to form two symmetrical rings. He rubbed his paws together, bent his little knees and threw himself into the air.
One must note that a dormouse cannot fling himself into the air very high at all.
Neither foot landed in the trouser rings that Wilbur had so confidently crafted. In fact, his trousers had somehow landed even further away.
“Bother,” said Wilbur.
Wilbur toddled through the autumn woodland, bucked tooth smile and exaggerated stride a tell-tale sign of a proud mouse who has successfully tugged his trousers on. Eventually. With an acorn held by his side, he knocked upon the door of a cottage that was nestled in the trunk of a knotted oak tree.
An enthusiastic squirrel answered the door spectacles first.
“Salutations, dear friend! Oh, do come in, there is a lovely breakfast of....Gosh you brought an acorn! How marvellous you are!”
Squirrels are rather prone to speaking in large, fast paced sentences, and have the most natural of talents to turn humble conversations into utter nonsense. He often joined the large, noisy squirrel family for breakfast, as he found having any social interactions during an absence of food an occasion filled with trauma and hungry, stress-induced twitching.
“Ah, good morning to you Gus.” said Wilbur.
“Spot of cranberry juice, chap?”
“Please.”
Breakfast at Gustifer Squirrel’s was a most exhausting affair. Baby squirrels scratched their way across the wooden table, ants knocked at windows and someone was always bound to end up with a berry seed in their eye. “It’s nice to see you Wilbur,” Gus said, greedy paws melded to a piece of toast. “Gwen has almost finished sewing your trousers, haven’t you dear? I still don’t understand how you managed to rip them clean in half!” Wilbur was too busy deciding whether the blackberries or raspberries looked more palatable. He just shrugged.
Sometimes, the unlikely companions followed breakfast with a stroll, for even dormice and squirrels need the occasional exercise. It was an unusually cold day, so Wilbur pulled on his tweed hat especially tight, and Gus tucked extra socks into his gumboots.
Gus didn’t think much. It was all too easy to say he didn’t think at all. That day, when they walked through the woods, Wilbur thought a great deal. He thought about every animal they greeted as they passed, he thought about the way every leaf floated like a feather toward the ground. Thoughts regarding what book he would read when he got home and how on earth he could improve his trouser-donning skills for the future frequently crossed his busy mind. Gus’ mindless chatter was heard only by the trees, but that wasn’t unusual and it suited them both.
They had crossed the rickety bridge that lead from the village to the deepest part of the woods. Rotted oak laced with thick, wet moss that almost seemed to drip with contempt, groaned with age as the two pairs of paws tapped across it. Wilbur jumped in every single puddle that they passed. For a middle-aged dormouse, he could splash almost as well as he could in his teenage years.
Along the mossy gully, where willow trees grew exceptionally tall and lilies leaked into the creek like a disease, Wilbur spotted an especially large puddle and his eyes widened with anticipation.
Leaving Gus, whose chatter still resembled a stuck record, he raced towards the watery treasure. Of course, this didn’t happen very fast at all. He took a great leap, and in a fashion similar to the way he attempts to put his trousers on in the morning, launched himself into the puddle.
At the last possible second before he inevitably landed in the water, a shiny, silver cylinder just beneath the surface appeared in his peripheral vision.
The reflexes of a dormouse are somewhat akin to that of a blind sea snail. Wilbur tried so very hard to move his plump little legs, but to no avail.
It wasn’t until Wilbur landed with a heavy splash, that he noticed the puddle had a slight red tinge to it. Perhaps Wilbur would have thought about this, had he not been interrupted by a shriek and the footprints of squirrel paws.
“I say, Wilbur! Are you alright?”
“Y-y-yes, I am quite alright thank you. But oh!” Whiskers twitching, he reached gingerly into the puddle and felt his paws on the cool metal of the cylinder. It was not heavy, and it gleamed in the mid-morning sunshine.
For once, Gustifer was speechless.
The light caught the small metal thing as Wilbur held it in the air; red droplets drip-dripping through the fur on his arm. He ran his paw along the tapered metal. Awe had since been lost to Gus, and he began to speak again, like a music box that had been overwound. “I know what that is! For the life of me, I never thought I’d see one,” Gustifer said, snatching the cylinder. “This, my dearest friend, is a hat.” He proceeded to ceremoniously crown Wilbur, and roughly shoved his delicate little dormouse ears to the side.
For once, Wilbur’s curiosity got the better of him, and he spoke up. “Why is this hat so special though?” Wilbur whispered, his own soggy tweed hat held to his furry chest. Gustifer crouched down low, as if he was about to share the very secret of the universe itself. “It is rumoured,” Gustifer whispered, “That this hat was once a crown of the Royal Field Mice. But of course, that was years ago, we’ll never know who it belonged to now. So, old king Willy, it’s all yours.”
Wilbur did something he did not do very often at all.
Wilbur smiled.
However, one must note that Gustifer was very wrong indeed. It was not a hat at all.
