Rudolph Saves Christmas

7: Hide and No Seek

A steady trail of deep footprints followed the pair, as Rudolph ploughed through the snow. His hooves were well suited to this sort of weather, but it was still hard going. Flop, being so much lighter, hardly made a mark as he scampered across the surface, flitting this way and that, checking for anyone that might see them. The reindeer felt that even the snow was against him. The holes where he'd walked should have been filling in as they went, but there were still clear signs of exactly which way they'd gone. Even Great-Granny Gerty could track them at this rate.

Great-Granny Gerty was the oldest elf in the town. She was all wrinkles and aches and talcum powder ("Fills in the cracks my smile makes, my love") and she hadn't been able to see properly for years. She couldn't walk very far without the aid of her cane - which was often a major problem for her as it was, obviously, made from candy and she kept sucking on it was she sat in her armchair in front of her fire on the long winter nights. She also kept sucking on it as she sat in her armchair by her window on the shorter summer nights. Saying that, while she was teaching Christmas Jumper knitting class or having tea and scones with her friends, the cane was never far from her mouth.

"It's my only pleasure, my love," she'd say. No-one could blame her though, as candy canes from the North Pole really were the best ever, but hers was larger than most to help her walk.

As for the snow, it couldn't believe that the mighty Rudolph could do such a thing, so the last thing it was going to do was help him by hiding the evidence of his escape route. Unfortunately - well, fortunately for him - the wind was on the reindeer's side. Rudolph just wouldn't, so it blew the snow into the holes as much as it could. A little battle was going on that neither side was really winning, so the holes were actually getting smaller, but very slowly.

Eventually they made it to Flop's home. The squirrel pushed the door open and ran inside, shaking the snow from his fur. Rudolph squeezed through after (it wasn't quite made for someone as big as him), and sank to the floor panting, the snow making a puddle around him as it quickly melted to be off the traitor.

Flop's tree house was exactly that - a house in a tree. It wasn't your typical wooden hut stuck high up the branches, with only a rope ladder for access. No, this was a house in a tree. Just because he couldn't scale their lofty heights, trees were still part of his heritage and so he felt much more comfortable among them than he would in a normal house. There were two kinds of trees in the North Pole. You had your traditional fir trees which made the most beautiful Christmas trees possible. They deliberately grew to the perfect shape and colour ready to adorn the houses of the elves and be decorated in bright colours. The other sort was short and squat with massive round trunks that were covered in so much snow you couldn't even tell they were there. These trees were the ones that hid the town and the Toy Factory and the elves and Santa from the outside world. It was inside one of these that Flop had made his home.

Flop was really quite small, especially compared to reindeer and elves (some of whom didn't even see him when he spoke to them) but, being a squirrel, he was a bubbling ball of energy that couldn't, normally, keep still even when asleep. He was like a spring coiled so tightly you could imagine him snapping at any moment and bouncing off the walls and ceiling. As such, his home was big enough to allow any sudden release of that energy to vent itself. It meant that his walls were wide apart and his ceiling was high and so Rudolph, or any other visitors, wouldn't feel either claustrophobic or downright squashed.

"What now?" Rudolph asked. "They're bound to find us eventually. They'll figure out that you've helped me, and they'll be able to follow our tracks in the snow right here."

"Well, your tracks, at least. Mine will be gone. You might want to lay off the chocolate covered carrots, you know."

"Pardon?"