Wild Folk

by Samuel Scoville

As time went by, with every new experience and with every new escape, Chippy grew larger and wiser and stronger. Then came the glittering summer afternoon when he won the right to rank with the bravest and best of the colony. The heat eddied across the hill in shimmering waves as he started home from where he had been foraging, his cheek-pockets full of samples for his storehouse. As he neared his front door by the stone wall he saw Death itself entering his little neighbor’s burrow. Black, sinuous, terrible, a giant blacksnake over six feet in length had found its way from its den on the other side of the hill to the chipmunk colony. Its smooth scales showed an absolute black in the sunlight, and made a crisp, rustling noise as it streamed over the dry leaves and grass of the hillside. Except for that sound, there was silence. At times the great snake would stop and, raising its head two feet from the ground and swaying back and forth, would stare here and there with fixed lidless eyes while the white patch on its lower jaw gleamed in the sun, and its long, black forked tongue played in and out like the flicker of a flame.

Suddenly the snake shot into Chippy’s burrow. Over a third of its length had disappeared from sight when Chippy showed a flash of that instantaneous, unreckoning courage which carries man or beast into the front ranks of his kind. Perhaps what he did was to save himself from future danger. Yet who can say that it was not a spark of the same divine fire which glows in the heart of man that made him risk his life for another? As he saw the fatal head disappear down the burrow, with a lightning-like spring he leaped upon the disappearing body, casting out his cherished nuts from his cheeks in mid-air. Opening his wide-set jaws, he clamped them shut where the supple, flexible spine of the snake ridged the smooth skin. The back of a blacksnake is a mass of tough muscles, and its spine has the strength of a steel spring. Yet the tremendous jaw-muscles of the chipmunk drove the needle-pointed teeth deep into the twisted, over-lapping fibres.

The black column stiffened like an iron bar. Bracing his paws against the sides of the hole, the chipmunk gnawed away desperately. Suddenly the keen teeth grated, and then locked in the sinuous spine itself. As they met, the great body surged forward and dragged the chipmunk into the burrow. Once deep underground, there was danger that the snake might find space to double back on its length and gain a fatal head-hold with its sharp slanting teeth. Yet Chippy never loosed his grip for an instant. Dragging back with all his strength, he forced his clamped teeth deeper and deeper into the twisting spine. At last through the cold, bubbling blood, he felt the fibres of the vertebrae slowly give, until with a final rending tug he bit clear through the spinal cord.

By this time he was well below ground, and only the snake’s tail thrashed and writhed ineffectually on the surface. Suddenly, as Chippy still gnawed and tugged, the lashings of the tail lessened, and through his clenched teeth he could feel something tugging and biting at it. Little by little the struggles of the snake became fainter, and Chippy no longer felt himself dragged forward. When at last they had died down to convulsive twists and shudders, which would last for hours, the battling chipmunk unlocked his jaws and backed out of the burrow. Bloody, bruised and exhausted he found himself once more safe in the sunlight.

Right in front of him was Nippy, worrying the wriggling tail with her sharp teeth like a little terrier. Aroused far underground by the sounds of the struggle she had rushed up toward the entrance. While still a long distance from it, her quick little ears caught the fierce hiss that the great snake gave at the first pang from the piercing teeth; and though this was her first year alone in the world, she knew that the sound meant death. Turning like a flash, she slipped into a by-passage and escaped to the upper air by an emergency exit concealed under a huckleberry bush. At her front door she found the tail of the crippled snake thrashing back and forth, and pouncing upon it, she helped her unseen ally by biting through the spine in two places at its narrowest point. When Chippy appeared, she let go, and by degrees the writhing body disappeared from the sight of the sun. Then, while Chippy lay and panted, the little owner of the burrow began to seal up the entrance of the haunted home in token that it was hers no longer. The front door once shut and locked, she moved slowly toward the top of the hill and—looked back.

Then was the time for Chippy to follow. Instead, he stiffly and haltingly betook himself to his own burrow. When, two days later, he came out, there was no trace of the fair and fleeting Nippy. For weeks he sought her everywhere, in the woods and pastures, and even to the shore of the little lake that cupped the farther side of the hill.

Then came a happening which drove all thoughts of anything but life and death from the minds of all the dwellers on the hillside. The doom which always hangs over the Little People fell upon them. In the gray hour just before the dawn, one fatal day, what looked like a brown squirrel, with a white throat and paws and a short tail, came to the chipmunk colony. Yet no squirrel ever had such bloodred eyes, such a serpent-like head, or a body so lithe and sinuous. The deadly visitor was none other than the lesser, or short-tailed, weasel, far more dangerous to the Little People than his larger kinsman, since he was small enough to enter their burrows.

To-day he slipped like a shadow into the first burrow he found. It happened to be the very one of which the stranger chipmunk had dispossessed Chippy months before. This morning he had just waked up in his round sleeping-room when he heard the patter of the weasel down the long entrance tunnel. Out of one of his many exits the chipmunk dashed, but as he came above ground, the weasel was hard on his heels, and he turned to do battle for his life. As he was nearly as large as the weasel, the fight did not seem an unequal one; yet the chipmunk never had a chance. For a second the two faced each other, the chipmunk crouched low, the weasel with its swaying head raised high. Then the chipmunk lunged forward, desperately hoping to gain a grip with its two keen gnawing teeth. With a curve of its supple body, the weasel slipped the other’s lead, and with almost the same motion gave that fatal counter which no animal has yet learned to parry. With a snap of the triangular muzzle, three of the long fighting teeth of the killer pierced with diabolical accuracy the chipmunk’s skull at the exact point where it was thinnest, and crashed deep into its brain.

Stopping only to lap a little of the warm blood of its victim, the weasel flashed into the next burrow, where a mother chipmunk slept with her five babies, all rolled up in a round warm ball. To them all, death came mercifully swift. Then into the next burrow and the next this Death-in-the-dark hastened. None of the Little People he met escaped. Some fought, others fled, but neither courage nor fleetness availed. When, at last, the brown killer approached the burrow where Chippy lived, it had left behind it a trail of nearly a score of dead and dying victims, and yet was as tireless and terrible as ever. Each time that it slaked its vampire-thirst with fresh blood, it seemed to gain new strength and speed.