a dozen pairs of squirrels were the extent and limit of the wild creatures. And at the moment this story opens, one of these squirrels was perched on a wide-spreading limb over-arching a gravel path that slanted through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. He wished that some one would come along with a nut.
There was a bench beneath the tree. If there had not been, the life of Dan Failing would have been entirely different. In fact, as the events will show, there would n't have been any life worth talking about at all. If the squirrel had been on any other tree, if he had n't been hungry, if any one of a dozen other things had n't been as they were, Dan Failing would have never gone back to the land of his people. The little bushy-tailed fellow on the tree limb was the squirrel of Destiny!
