On the mound of newly digged earth before it, is that erect, motionless, gray and russet form a half decayed stump uprising where no tree has grown within your memory? You move a little nearer to inspect the strange anomaly, and lo! it vanishes, and you know it was your old acquaintance, the woodchuck, standing guard at his door and overlooking his green and blossoming domain.
Are you not sorry, to-day at least, to hear the boys and the dog besieging him in his burrow or in the old stone wall wherein he has taken sanctuary? Surely, the first beautiful days of his open-air life should not be made so miserable that he would wish himself asleep again in the safety and darkness of winter. But you remember that you were once a boy, and your sympathies are divided between the young savages and their intended prey, which after all is likelier than not to escape.
He will tangle the meadow-grass and make free with the bean patch if he chances upon it, yet you are glad to see the woodchuck, rejoicing like yourself in the advent of spring.
VIII
THE CHIPMUNK
As the woodchuck sleeps away the bitterness of cold, so in his narrower chamber sleeps the chipmunk. Happy little hermit, lover of the sun, mate of the song sparrow and the butterflies, what a goodly and hopeful token of the earth's renewed life is he, verifying the promises of his own chalices, the squirrelcups, set in the warmest corners of the woodside, with libations of dew and shower drops, of the bluebird's carol, the sparrow's song of spring.
Now he comes forth from his long night into the fullness of sunlit day, to proclaim his awakening to his summer comrades, a gay recluse clad all in the motley, a jester, maybe, yet no fool.
His voice, for all its monotony, is inspiring of gladness and contentment, whether he utters his thin, sharp chip or full-mouthed cluck, or laughs a chittering mockery as he scurries in at his narrow door.
He winds along his crooked pathway of the fence rails and forages for half-forgotten nuts in the familiar grounds, brown with strewn leaves or dun with dead grass. Sometimes he ventures to the top rail and climbs to a giddy ten-foot height on a tree, whence he looks abroad, wondering, on the wide expanse of an acre.