Morning found the fir tree practicing patience. Crossbills sat in a loose ring around a cone and fitted tiny corkscrews to their beaks as if they were borrowing silverware. Before any seed moved, each bird said hello to the scales and gave the squirrel on the lower branch a nod that meant: after you, even if you are only watching.
We asked at the kiosk by the park gate. "People said they had opened a restaurant in the needles," a man with a paper bag of crumbs told us. "It was only manners. They take one seed, then they wait, and the squirrel gets the same courtesy a neighbor would get at a bakery counter."
The park keeper pinned a note to the trunk: guests may unscrew breakfast one seed at a time, and the cone is not in a hurry. By dusk a scale had closed itself like a tiny door, and the squirrel left two empty shells on the snow as thanks.
A day later the same squirrel came back with a friend. They sat through one whole corkscrew turn, then went home looking as if the tree had invited them to tea.