#21 Treetops and Honeypots

Ezra tilted his head as he finally heard some buzzing. Buzzing meant bees, and bees meant honey! That meant that he was close. If only he could actually spot where the noise was coming from.

"Found you!" he cheered when he finally spotted it after a fair bit of squinting. A beehive! A quite high beehive too, just like he had wished for. How lucky.

A small voice whispered through his mind about if it was actually a good idea to try to get to it, but Ezra was too excited and eager for an adventure to really pay attention to that. Climbing the tree was going to be fun, he was sure of it.

He approached the tree and, after a brief struggle with getting to the first branch, he was away. Up the tree he went, higher and higher, winding this way and that as he navigated himself up the thicker branches.

Occasionally he would pause his climbing to look up at the beehive, to check that it was still there and full of honey. He was not quite sure where he thought the hive might disappear to, or if he was actually just worried about tiny fairy bears stealing all of the honey, but whatever the reason, small pauses probably hurt nothing.

Soon enough and he was high enough to comfortably reach the hive, the buzzing a fair bit louder that close to the source.

Ezra settled himself so that he was sat, his legs hanging down either side of his branch, and then shuffled as close as he could to the hive.

His seat as secure as it could be so high in a tree, he then carefully slid his backpack off and pulled it around to wear on his front. He could not reach around to get his jars in and out when it was on his back after all, but he did not want to drop it either.

That seemed like a good compromise and he could not help but wonder why people did not wear their backpacks on their front more often. It seemed like a very useful idea!

Would it still be called a backpack then though? Or a frontpack? Chestpack?

Ezra shook that distraction from his mind and focused back on his target. The beehive. With the real bees buzzing about. Huh, maybe he had not thought this through fully.

"Please don't sting me," he said as he stretched to scoop the honey into his first ready jar.

He repeated the routine with his second jar, being as careful as he could with his movements. He did not want to hurt any of the little bees by accident.

It was as he got his third jar ready that he finally hesitated. Were there more bees buzzing around? Ezra shot them a cautious look and then, before the little voice in his mind could get through to tell him to get his butt back to the ground, he filled his third jar.

As soon as he was done with that, and had his bag zipped back up with the jars inside, Ezra was shuffling back away from the hive. It was definitely time to be leaving that particular tree.

He wiped his hands off on his robe and then he was off again. Down the tree this time, though maybe he was not as careful as he had been on his way up it.

It was lucky then, that he had only stretched one leg down and still had hold of his last branch when he heard the creak of the branch that his left leg had been about to stand on.

"That wasn't good," he said once he had calmed himself from the brief fright the noise had caused. He did not fancy falling from a tree. Not when he was still that high up. That would not be fun.

Ezra took the rest of his descent at a much slower pace after that. He tried his best to retrace the path that he had taken when he was going up, using the thicker branches that had kept him safe then.

His slow pace must have paid off, since it did not sound like any of his chosen branches were going to break under him after that one. He got all the way to the lowest branch on his route without hearing a scary crack.

That last branch had him pause for another reason though. Sure, it had been hard to get up to, but it had not been that high on the way up.. right? Was he just unable to see a foothold that he had used previously?

Ezra hesitated for a long moment before he finally pushed his worry down and shifted himself so that he was dangling from the branch. Even then he could not reach the ground.

Seeing no other option since he was quite stuck, he took a breath and dropped from the branch.

He landed on his feet for all of a second before he fell back on his bottom.

"Ow!" He cried, more from shock than actual pain.

From his position on the ground, Ezra could see a branch on the other side of the tree, this one lower than the one he had just dropped from. Huh, maybe that was where he had climbed up.

Oh well. At least his bag was still safely hanging against his front so he had not landed on it. That meant that his jars of honey should still be safe, even if he was a bit bruised from getting them.