The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I have sometimes seen chickadee in winter when he seemed to come to me out of very need for living companionship. But in the flood-tide of summer life chipmunk will watch me from his stone pile and tag me along with every show of friendship.

The family in the orchard wall have grown very familiar. They flatter me. I really believe, to be Emersonian, that I am the great circumstance in this household. One of the number is sure to be sitting upon the high flat slab to await my coming. He sits on the very edge of the crack, to be truthful, and if I take a single step aside toward him he flips, and all there is left of him is a little angry squeak from the depths of the stones. If, however, I pass properly along, do not stop or make any sudden motions, he sees me past, then usually follows me, especially if I get well off and pause.

During a shower one day I halted under a large hickory just beyond his den. He came running after me, so interested that he forgot to look to his footing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his nose hard against a stone,—so hard that he sat up immediately and vigorously rubbed it. Another time he followed me across to the garden and on to the barbed-wire fence along the meadow. Here he climbed a post and continued after me by way of the middle strand of the wire, wriggling, twisting, even grabbing the barbs, in his efforts to maintain his balance. He got midway between the posts, when the sagging strand tripped him and he fell with a splash into a shallow pool below.

Did the family in the orchard wall stay together as a family for the first summer, I should like to know. As late as August they all seemed to be in the wall, for in August I cut my oats, and during this harvest they all worked together.

I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow, cocking them to cure for hay. It was necessary to let them “make” for six or seven days, and all this time the squirrels raced back and forth between the cocks and the stone wall. They might have hidden their gleanings in a dozen crannies nearer at hand; but evidently they had a particular storehouse, near the home nest, where the family could get at their provisions in bad weather without coming forth.

Had I removed the stones and dug out the nest, I should have found a tunnel leading into the ground for a few feet and opening into a chamber filled with a bulky grass nest,—a bed capable of holding half a dozen chipmunks, and adjoining this, by a short passageway, the storehouse of the oats.

How many trips they made between this crib and the oat patch, how many kernels they carried in their pouches at a trip, and how big a pile they had when all the grains were in,—these are more of the questions I should like to know.

I might have killed one of the squirrels and numbered the contents of his pouches, but my scientific zeal does not quite reach that pitch any more. The knowledge of just how many oat kernels a chipmunk can stuff into his left cheek (into both cheeks he can put twenty-nine kernels of corn) is really not worth the cost of his life. Of course some one has counted them,—just as some one has counted the hairs on the tail of the dog of the child of the wife of the Wild Man of Borneo, or at least seriously guessed at the number.

But this is thesis work for the doctors of philosophy, not a task for farmers and mere watchers in the woods. The chipmunks are in no danger because of my zeal for science; not that I am uninterested in the capacity of their cheeks in terms of oats, but that I am more interested in the whole squirrel, the whole family of squirrels.