The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

It is not often that one comes upon even the red squirrel in the very act of robbing a nest. But the black snake, the glittering fiend! and the dear house cats! If I run across a dozen black snakes in the early summer, it is safe to say that six of them will be discovered by the cries of the birds they are robbing. Likewise the cats. No creature, however, larger than a June-bug was ever distressed by a chipmunk.

In a recent letter to me Mr. Burroughs says: “No, I never knew the chipmunk to suck or destroy eggs of any kind, and I have never heard of any well-authenticated instance of his doing so. The red squirrel is the sinner in this respect, and probably the gray squirrel also.”

It will be difficult to find a true bill against him. Were the evidence all in, I believe that instead of a culprit we should find chipmunk a useful citizen. I reckon that the pile of June-bug bodies on the flat stone leaves me still in debt to him even after the strawberries have been credited. He may err occasionally, and may, on occasion, make a nuisance of himself,—but so do my four small boys, bless them! And, well—who doesn’t? When a family of chipmunks, which you have fed all summer on the veranda, take up their winter quarters inside the closed cabin, and chew up your quilts, hammocks, table-cloths, and whatever else there is of chewable properties, then they are anathema.

The litter and havoc that those squirrels made were dreadful. But instead of exterminating them root and branch, a big box was prepared the next summer and lined with tin, in which the linen was successfully wintered.

But how real was the loss, after all? Here is a rough log cabin on the side of Thorn Mountain. What sort of a tablecloth ought to be found in such a cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed by chipmunks? Is it for fine linen that we take to the woods in summer? The chipmunks are well worth a tablecloth now and then,—well worth, besides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they can steal from my small patch.

Only it isn’t stealing. Since I ceased throwing stones and began to watch the chipmunks carefully, I do not find their manner that of thieves in the least. They do not act as if they were taking what they have no right to. For who has told chipmunk to earn his oats in the sweat of his brow? No one. Instead he seems to understand that he is one of the innumerable factors ordained to make me sweat,—a good and wholesome experience for me so long as I get the necessary oats.

And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though I don’t like to guess at how much they carried off,—anywhere, I should say, from a peck to a bushel, which they stored, as they tried to store the berries, somewhere in the big recesses of the stone wall.

All this, however, is beside the point. It isn’t a case of oats and berries against June-bugs. You don’t haggle with Nature after that fashion. The farm is not a marketplace where you get exactly what you pay for. You must spend on the farm all you have of time and strength and brains; but you must not expect merely your money’s worth. Infinitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farming is like virtue,—its own reward. It pays the man who loves it, no matter how short the oats and corn.

So it is with chipmunk. Perhaps his books don’t balance,—a few June-bugs short on the credit side. What then? It isn’t mere bugs and berries, as I have just suggested, but stone piles. What is the difference in value to me between a stone pile with and without a chipmunk in it. Just the difference, relatively speaking, between the house with or without my four boys in it.

Chipmunk, with his sleek, round form, his rich color and his stripes, is the daintiest, most beautiful of all our squirrels. He is one of the friendliest of my tenants, too, friendlier even than chickadee. The two are very much alike in spirit, but however tame and confiding chickadee may become, he is still a bird, and, despite his wings, belongs to a different and a lower order of beings. Chickadee is often curious about me; he can be coaxed to eat from my hand. Chipmunk is more than curious; he is interested; and it is not crumbs that he wants, but friendship. He can be coaxed to eat from my lips, sleep in my pocket, and even come to be stroked.