Moving from temporary shelter to temporary shelter was a chilly experience with the warmest times being the overland (and water) exhertions in between places, except for the occasional kindnes and warm bodies offered by other creatures more than willing to share their abodes, despite obvious species differences. The ants would not have welcomed her, even had Nowell been of the right size for their passageways and chambers, but the snakes who slept all balled up and had no heat of their own, would have been more than grateful for her warm presence, though she wasn't much inerested in a ball of snakes.

This possum though was most generous and alluring, not only because of her warm blood (except when she was really scared and fainted) but because her house at the time, the rib cage of a deer, was edible. The possum had a pocket in her front and she showed Nowell that she was carrying three crickets there. Nowella stayed one night with the possum: a night during which they ate a little more of the shelter, and still warmed it enough with their bodies - especially with the possum's Rudollphian nonse which, was pink as nowells sneaker bottoms, and, although it did not glow in the dark, gave off enough heat by itself that when she nuzzled them in her pocket, the two crickets, came out and sang until the wind came through the ribs.

It was a sweet time there with that little family, but short. Nowella had begun to realize about then, that though she was no beaver, she was becoming vegetarian, and besides she was coming to believe more and more in the seperation of food and shelter. Fish, she could still eat, but she wouldn't want to live inside one. to say nothing of eating her bed.