The House at Pooh Corner - A. A. Milne [25]
When Tigger had finished waiting for the others to catch him up, and they hadn’t, and when he had got tired of having nobody to say, “I say, come on” to, he thought he would go home. So he trotted back; and the first thing Kanga said when she saw him was “There’s a good Tigger. You’re just in time for your Strengthening Medicine,” and she poured it out for him. Roo said proudly, “I’ve had mine,” and Tigger swallowed his and said, “So have I,” and then he and Roo pushed each other about in a friendly way, and Tigger accidentally knocked over one or two chairs by accident, and Roo accidentally knocked over one on purpose, and Kanga said, “Now then, run along.”
“Where shall we run along to?” asked Roo.
“You can go and collect some fir-cones for me,” said Kanga, giving them a basket.
So they went to the Six Pine Trees, and threw fir-cones at each other until they had forgotten what they came for, and they left the basket under the trees and went back to dinner. And it was just as they were finishing dinner that Christopher Robin put his head in at the door.
“Where’s Pooh?” he asked.
“Tigger dear, where’s Pooh?” said Kanga. Tigger explained what had happened at the same time that Roo was explaining about his Biscuit Cough and Kanga was telling them not both to talk at once, so it was some time before Christopher Robin guessed that Pooh and Piglet and Rabbit were all lost in the mist on the top of the Forest.
“It’s a funny thing about Tiggers,” whispered Tigger to Roo, “how Tiggers never get lost.”
“Why don’t they, Tigger?”
“They just don’t,” explained Tigger. “That’s how it is.”
“Well,” said Christopher Robin, “we shall have to go and find them, that’s all. Come on, Tigger.”
“I shall have to go and find them,” explained Tigger to Roo.
“May I find them too?” asked Roo eagerly.
“I think not today, dear,” said Kanga. “Another day.”
“Well, if they’re lost tomorrow, may I find them?”
“We’ll see,” said Kanga, and Roo, who knew what that meant, went into a corner, and practised jumping out at himself, partly because he wanted to practise this, and partly because he didn’t want Christopher Robin and Tigger to think that he minded when they went off without him.
“The fact is,” said Rabbit, “we’ve missed our way somehow.”
They were having a rest in a small sand-pit on the top of the Forest. Pooh was getting rather tired of that sand-pit, and suspected it of following them about, because whichever direction they started in, they always ended up at it, and each time, as it came through the mist at them, Rabbit said triumphantly, “Now I know where we are!” and Pooh said sadly, “So do I,” and Piglet said nothing. He had tried to think of something to say, but the only thing he could think of was, “Help, help!” and it seemed silly to say that, when he had Pooh and Rabbit with him.
“Well,” said Rabbit, after a long silence in which nobody thanked him for the nice walk they were having, “we’d better get on, I suppose. Which way shall we try?”
“How would it be,” said Pooh slowly, “if, as soon as we’re out of sight of this Pit, we try to find it again?”
“What’s the good of that?” said Rabbit.
“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.”
“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit.
“No,” said Pooh humbly, “there isn’t. But there was going to be when I began it. It’s just that something happened to it on the way.”
“If I walked away from this Pit, and then walked back to it, of course I should find it.”
“Well, I thought perhaps you wouldn’t,” said Pooh. “I just thought.”
“Try,” said Piglet suddenly. “We’ll wait here for you.”
Rabbit gave a laugh to show how silly Piglet was, and walked into the mist. After he had gone a hundred yards, he turned and walked back again…and after Pooh and Piglet had waited twenty