The Chronicles of Stinky Cove · Book 4

Burr

The Squirrel Who Kept Everything

Burr has seventeen thousand and one cones, and he can tell you where every one of them is. That is the problem.

He is a red squirrel the color of a rusted hinge and the weight of two sticks of butter, and he keeps the biggest pile of cones on the hill, which he will tell you is not a pile. It is a country. He has never in his life said the word enough. Then a November nor’easter comes up the bay on a high tide, and the hill finds out what a lifetime of saving weighs against one night of wind.

Down in Halftide, twelve-year-old Owen Alley has just been handed the wildlife club’s winter feeder program: a clipboard, a padlock key, and forty pounds of black oil sunflower seed, more than he has ever seen in one place. It is the first thing that has ever been his to run. He is not planning to share it either.

Eleven weeks, one storm, two hoarders, and a hill that is going to get through the winter together whether anybody likes it or not.