When she saw the shoes, Nowella did not wonder like you would how they got there or think about Uncle ThreadBears homily(since she didn't even know him yet) She didn't think or decide anything: she just stepped into the shoes, and set off across the meadow leaving the oak for ever.
She had hung out in the big hollow oak, for longer than in other places, because it suited her just about right, and she could go up into its upper branches where there were windows,,parapetsand nut troves. And she could go down through the hallowed root passages used by a hundred generatins of woodchucks, skunks, and possums, and too were many forgotten acorn troves, and sometimes over wintering cirtters oversleepng from one year to another, or drowsing out a dry spell, none of whom, winter or summer, from the snake balls to the bee colonies, were particularly irritable in that hospitable dormitory. It was a good home with as much privacy , and company as she could want. And besides that were the lovely solitudes all around and the small mall nearby with a grocery and an occasionally acessible dumpster.
In the trees upper hollows Nowella learned to sleep with the bees, which, for the price of her being very slow and and unthreateniung around them, would hive around her, and keep her warm as they did themselves and moved the air through as well. The air was so sweeet she didn't even need to lick her lips to get way too much honey. She liked most to just sit at the main entrance to the tree and look out There had been plenty of room in and around the tree for all until, around the time of the shoes, the humans buildings began to pop up right there behind the hedgerow. It was that and the shoes that told her it was time to move again
And when she did resume her wandering, in wintery weather and in nothing but her blue shoes, she was always looking for a place nearly as good as the good old oak, but there was most always something left to be desired.
A bear goes mostly on intuition, which it has a lot of. What a bear does not have though is fingers So Nowella was not at first able to tie or fasten her shoes. Mayabe a racoon could have done that. Maybe not.
Still she was able to stand with them on snow with a crust no thicker than a grapefruit skin, but every few steps, one or the other shoe would fall off.
Just shuffeling along worked fairly well and she finally learned a sort of skating motion that kept them on fairly well and got her moving well, but it wasn't until she got involved with burdocks that she found the method of bears tying shoes. Which was with burdocks of course. And you already know about that.
And she really needed the clothing, because clothing is what you need when you are not at home, and she had trouble settling on a home for more than a night or two and sometimes she would jusst skate the night away. Fortunately she loved to skate through the night.
