Chapter One

How's Life Treating You, Viskovitz?

There's nothing more boring than life, nothing more depressing than light, nothing more bogus than reality. For me every waking was a dying-living was being dead.

Jana squeaked, "Wake up, Visko! It's May! They'll end up getting all the best acorns."

With great difficulty I stretched and grudgingly opened one eye. Because in spite of everything, you have to live.

"Just a minute," I croaked. "I have to thaw out."

It was the end of an eight-month hibernation. I was waking up in the gray hereafter, the underworld of dormice.

In the darkness of the den I made out topiform shadows tottering past piles of slumberers, heading out of this sepulcher-souls of those who had passed on, who were transmigrating into wakefulness. As was I.

I rolled onto one side, and all the bones of my mortal remains creaked. I began to recognize the familiar outlines of members of my tribe-nephews, nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces, grandparents and great-grandparents, parents and parents-in-law. Some of them were catching forty more winks, curled up under their long furry tails. They were groaning as they gave themselves over to that devastating pleasure.

As my metabolism got into gear I was tortured by pains in my joints, by dehydration, by the distress of every single cell. It was the agony of reawakening, of a torment that would last another four months until the next hibernation. At a time like this there's only hunger that gives you the strength to get to your feet-the knowledge that if you don't fatten up, you won't be able to get back to sleep.

"Up and at 'em!" I said to