Sweetest Dreams: The Hushwillow Treasury of Gentle Bedtime Stories

Chapter 1: Animal Friends

At the edge of a small riverside village called Hushwillow, where the back gardens end and a low stone wall wanders along the grass, there is a wood. It is called Thistledown Wood, and it is a friendly sort of wood, full of ferns and foxgloves and paths that curl about like sleepy cats. And in that wood lived a hedgehog named Bramble.

Bramble was small and round, with brown prickles tipped with cream, a pointy pink-brown nose, and two bright black eyes like shiny blackberries. He was seven and a half in hedgehog years, which is quite grown up, though not completely. Around his neck he always wore a soft blue knitted scarf.

He had found the scarf last autumn, lying on the path at the Edge of the Wood, right by the stile. It had been damp and lonely and a little bit muddy. Bramble had washed it in Tumble Brook and dried it on a sunny stone, and ever since then he had worn it every single day. It smelled faintly of peppermint, and of something else too, something Bramble could only describe as "somebody small and kind." He did not know whose it had been. Sometimes he wondered.

On this particular morning, Bramble was trotting along the path toward Bluebell Bank, wrapped twice round in his scarf, when he stopped so suddenly that his nose bumped the ground.

There, lying across the path, was something enormous.

It was flat and wide and greenish-gold. It had pointy edges, and long lines running through it like rivers on a map. It was bigger than Bramble. It was bigger than three Brambles. And one end of it curled up into the air in a way that looked, Bramble thought, exactly like an ear.

"Oh, prickles," whispered Bramble.

He took one step back. Then another.

"It is an ear," he said to himself. "A giant's ear. And where there is a giant's ear, there is probably a giant." He began to count under his breath, which is what he always did when his tummy felt wobbly. "One pebble. Two pebbles. Three pebbles. Four."

The enormous thing did not move. It did not twitch. It did not listen. But that, thought Bramble, is exactly what a very sneaky ear would do.

"I need help," he decided, "and I need it quickly."

Dot the harvest mouse lived at the top of Bluebell Bank, in a round grass nest woven onto a tall, swaying stalk. She was tiny, with red-gold fur and a long curly tail that she wrapped around stems to hold on. When Bramble arrived, puffing, she was hanging upside down by that tail, drumming on her silver thimble with two little twigs.

"Bramble!" she cried. "Whiskers and wheat! You look as if you've seen a ghost! Have you seen a ghost? Was it a big one? Where?"

"Not a ghost," panted Bramble. "An ear. A giant's ear. On the path."

Dot flipped the right way up so fast that her whiskers wobbled. "A giant's ear! Show me! Show me right now!"

"I was hoping," said Bramble carefully, "that we might fetch Barnaby first."

So they did. Dot raced ahead, popping her thimble on her head like a helmet, and Bramble hurried behind, counting ferns. Down past the brambles (which were not named after him, though he liked to think so) and along the root bank they went, until they reached a round green door set into the earth. This was Burrowbank, where Barnaby the badger lived.

Bramble knocked. They waited. Dot hopped from foot to foot.

At last the door opened, slowly, and there stood Barnaby. He was big and slow and gentle, with a black-and-white striped face and a flowery apron tied round his middle. He had a spoon in one paw and a little bit of breakfast porridge on his nose.

"Now then," said Barnaby, ...