17-A REAL GENTLE MOUSE

A REAL GENTLE MOUSE That night, we sat around a crackling campfire. It turned out Miss Angel Paws's friend was a forest ranger. His name was Gentle Mouse. I wanted not to like him. After all, I came on this trip just to spend more time with Miss Angel Paws. But how could I hate a rodent with a name like that? Gentle Mouse knew a lot about nature. He showed us a maple leaf.

"From this TREE, we get MAPLE SYRUP," Gentle Mouse explained. He told the class how they could start their own collection of dried leaves. MAPLE SYRUP The sap from maple trees can be boiled down and made into maple sugar or maple syrup. When winter turned into spring, Native Americans would make V- shaped slashes in a maple tree trunk and collect the sap in a vessel. Then they would boil the sap down into sugar. The early European settlers learned this way of getting maple sugar from the Native Americans.

HOW TO MAKE A COLLECTION OF DRIED LEAVES 1 Gather some leaves that have fallen to the ground. Take care to choose the most beautiful ones—with lots of different colors, shapes, and dimensions. 2 As soon as you get home, clean the leaves well. To dry them, place them between two sheets of paper inside a thick book. 3 When the leaves are dry and flat, glue them in a notebook or put them in a photo album. 4. Next to each leaf, write its name and the date it was collected. 5. Near each leaf's common name, you can write its botanical name, which can be found in an encyclopedia or field guide.