The chipmunks soon became so tame that they ran all over the place, over the boys’ feet, on up to their shoulders, and into their pockets for the goodies they sometimes found. But they never ran under any one’s palm. Pedro got one cornered and caught him with his bare hands, and put him on a leash, but the furry mite spent the next half hour straining to get away, too unhappy to eat,—cowering, trembling, when the boys stroked his orange striped back with a gentle finger,—and Pedro finally gave him back his freedom, (and a pyramid of peanuts).
“Camp Chipmunk” it was finally voted to call the place, and the name was inscribed on the side of a huge fallen log with bits of yellow-green live moss.
Though the chipmunks could easily have gone to the creek, as they must have before the boys came, they displayed a preference for drinking out of the same water pail the boys did, and they sometimes took an unexpected and unappreciated plunge bath.
Besides the very tiny chipmunks, there were some of the ground-squirrel size with the same orange and black. They were duller of wit, and more timid, but they used to chase the little fellows to within an inch of their lives. One day a big Sayes chipmunk attempted to fish a cheese rind out of the fireplace. The ashes were still hot, and he plunged into the soft stuff over his head, he was out and away, with a piercing squeal, almost instantly, trailing white ash behind him.
The boys used to bury nuts just to see how fast the littlest chipmunks would smell them out. After repeatedly finding the Dutch oven bread nibbled around the edges, Pedro hung the bread-bag from the clothes-line one night. He was awakened next morning by the shout Ted sent up when he found two chipmunks running down the string and squeezing their way delightedly into the bag.
Some one always had to watch while the meal was being laid, for the mouselike villains would be right up on the table sampling the butter, if some one did not keep an eye out. Or they would climb up the leg of the table and peek over the edge with their beady eyes, wondering how far they dared approach without danger to their agile persons. But the funniest thing was when two chipmunks would quarrel,—as generally happened when one unearthed a nut that another had buried. Nickering in the angriest way imaginable, the two tiny things would come at each other with ears laid back, in what appeared for all the world like a head-butting contest. Around and around they would whirl in a spiral nebula, till one got a head start on a race for home and mother.
Each morning they awoke to the hack-hack-hack of the sawyers and the steady grating of the log saw, the twitter of the donkey engine and the volcanic remarks with which the bull-puncher was urging his team forward. The yellow sunshine sifted aslant through the giant trees, birds sang, and chipmunks chattered. A water-packer passed them one day with his mule plodding along under 40 gallons disposed in canvas bags on a wooden frame, and beyond, across the singing creek, they could see the swampers burning the brush they had cut from the pathway of the tree next to fall.
Breakfast dispatched, the boys hurried over to watch the two-bitted axe biting its huge kerf in the side of a ten-foot trunk. When it had eaten a third of the way through the giant trunk, the sawyers began on the opposite side, nearly as high as the top of the kerf, resting the long instrument on pegs driven into two holes that had been bored for the purpose. Iron wedges were driven after the saw. The instant the tree began to lean, the head chopper had driven a stake about 150 feet from the base on the side of the kerf, declaring that the falling tree would drive that stake into the ground, so accurately could they gauge the direction of its fall. The swampers had cleared the way between. Then came the cracking of neighboring branches, as the mammoth trunk swayed and toppled to the forest floor. There was a crash that shook the ground, which rebounded with a shower of chips and bark dust, and the stump gaped raw and red where for perhaps 2,000 years it had upborne the plumed Sequoia Gigantea.
The boys, far above whose heads the fallen trunk towered, scrambled up the rough bark and raced each other up and down the novel roadway that it made. Then, the excitement over, they suddenly realized that they were hungry and ran another race back to camp.
Later they watched as the donkey engine, stronger than ten oxen, was made fast to a stump and stoked till it could move itself into position to haul the log lengths to the waiting ox team. Peelers with axes and long steel bars had been peeling off the thick red bark, which the boys found could be whittled into odd shapes and rubbed velvety at the cut ends. The sawyers were sawing the trunk into lengths short enough to ride on box cars, and the chain tenders were driving the “dogs” or steel hooks into the forward segment preparatory to attaching the chain that was to draw the log after the panting donkey engine. The block shifter was ready with his pulley, and the gypsy tender was gathering down wood.