All the morning's trial of disbelief was worth that one moment, Caramon thought as he bolted for the door, worth that one, stunned look on the old dwarf's face. Laughing, he clattered down the wooden steps from the inn built high in the mighty vallenwood to the bridgewalks.
Around the town women looked up from their washing and baking, merchants abandoned their customers to run to windows, and children came flying from their games, all wondering what it was that caused the big youth's bellowing summons of his brother and his friend Tanis Half-Elven.
When the squirrel awoke he was confused. He slept a lot, it being still winter and he having some deeply rooted NEED to sleep. But when he slept he dreamed. And there was the source of his confusion: no squirrel ever dreamed during long winter sleeps. And, as though the fact of the dreaming wasn't enough, the dreams themselves were decidedly odd.
He dreamed about people. Not the gray-furred, broad tailed squirrel people. Humans walked in his dreams, and a dwarf, and a long-eyed half-elf with hair the color of a fox's pelt. In his dreams he knew who they were; sometimes he spoke with them and they with him. And when they spoke with him he knew — though he didn't quite understand how he knew — that they were not speaking to a squirrel.
It was almost as though he were having someone else's dreams.
Yawning now, stretching first his hind legs and then his front, he poked among the neatly piled acorn shells for some left-over tidbit. There was none.
He looked around the cottage, noted that the man was gone again, though his scent still clung to everything in the place, and then felt a sudden tightening of alarm: the cat prowled restlessly from window to door to window.