By and by, however, their animosity assumed a more practical shape: they began to destroy the trees on whose fruit the Little Ones lived.

This drove the mother of them all to meditate counteraction.

Setting the sharpest of them to listen at night, she learned that the giants thought I was hidden somewhere near, intending, as soon as I recovered my strength, to come in the dark and kill them sleeping.

Thereupon she concluded that the only way to stop the destruction was to give them ground for believing that they had abandoned the place.

The Little Ones must remove into the forest--beyond the range of the giants, but within reach of their own trees, which they must visit by night! The main objection to the plan was, that the forest had little or no undergrowth to shelter--or conceal them if necessary.
But she reflected that where birds, there the Little Ones could find habitation.