AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE
There were chipmunks everywhere. The stone walls squeaked with them.
At every turn, from early spring to early autumn, a chipmunk was
scurrying away from me. Chipmunks were common. They did no particular
harm, no particular good; they did nothing in particular, being only
chipmunks and common, or so I thought, until one morning (it was
June-bug time) when I stopped and watched a chipmunk that sat atop the
stone wall down in the orchard. He was eating, and the shells of his
meal lay in a little pile upon the big flat stone which served as his
table.
They were acorn-shells, I thought; yet June seemed rather late in the
season for acorns, and, looking closer, I discovered that the pile was
entirely composed of June-bug shells--wings and hollow bodies of the
pestiferous beetles!
Well, well! I had never seen this before, never even heard of it.
Chipmunk, a _useful_ member of society! actually eating bugs in this
bug-ridden world of mine! This was interesting and important. Why, I
had really never known Chipmunk, after all!
So I hadn’t. He had always been too common. Flying squirrels were
more worth while, because there were none on the farm. Now, however, I
determined to cultivate the acquaintance of Chipmunk, for there might
be other discoveries awaiting me. And there were.
A narrow strip of grass separated the orchard and my garden-patch. It
was on my way to the garden that I most often stopped to watch this
chipmunk, or rather the pair of them, in the orchard wall. June
advanced, the beetles disappeared, and the two chipmunks in the wall
were now seven, the young ones almost as large as their parents, and
both young and old on the best of terms with me.
For the first time in four years there were prospects of good
strawberries. Most of my small patch was given over to a new variety,
one that I had originated; and I was waiting with an eagerness which
was almost anxiety for the earliest berries.
I had put a little stick beside each of the three big berries that
were reddening first (though I could have walked from the house
blindfolded and picked them). I might have had the biggest of the
three on June 7th, but for the sake of the flavor I thought it best to
wait another day. On the 8th I went down to get it. The big berry was
gone, and so was one of the others, while only half of the third was
left on the vine!
Gardening has its disappointments, its seasons of despair--and wrath,
too. Had a toad showed himself at that moment, he might have fared
badly, for more than likely, I thought, it was he who had stolen my
berries. On the garden wall sat a friendly chipmunk eying me
sympathetically.
[Illustration: CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS]
A few days later several fine berries were ripe, and I was again on my
way to the garden when I passed the chipmunks in the orchard. A
shining red spot among the vine-covered stones of their wall brought
me to a stop. For an instant I thought that it was my rose-breasted
grosbeak, and that I was about to get a clew to its nest. Then up to
the slab where he ate the June-bugs scrambled the chipmunk, and the
rose-red spot on the breast of the supposed grosbeak dissolved into a
big scarlet-red strawberry. And by its long wedge shape I knew it was
one of my new variety.
I hurried across to the patch and found every berry gone, while a line
of bloody fragments led me back to the orchard wall, where a
half-dozen fresh calyx crowns completed my second discovery.
No, it did not complete it. It took a little watching to find out that
the whole family--all seven!--were after those berries. They were
picking them half ripe, even, and actually storing them away, canning
them, down in the cavernous depths of the stone-pile!
Alarmed? Yes, and I was wrathful, too. The taste for strawberries is
innate, original; you can’t be human without it. But joy in chipmunks
is a cultivated liking. What chance in such a circumstance has the
nature-lover with the human man? What shadow of doubt as to his choice
between the chipmunks and the strawberries?
I had no gun and no time to go over to my neighbor’s to borrow his. So
I stationed myself near by with a fistful of stones, and waited for
the thieves to show themselves. I came so near to hitting one of them
with a stone that the sweat started all over me. After that there was
no danger. I had lost my nerve. The little scamps knew that war had
been declared, and they hid and dodged and sighted me so far off that
even with a gun I should have been all summer killing the seven of
them.
Meantime, a good rain and the warm June days were turning the berries
red by the quart. They had more than caught up to the chipmunks. I
dropped my stones and picked. The chipmunks picked, too; so did the
toads and the robins. Everybody picked. It was free for all. We picked
them and ate them, jammed them, and canned them. I almost carried some
over to my neighbor, but took peas instead.
The strawberry season closed on the Fourth of July; and our taste was
not dimmed, nor our natural love for strawberries abated; but all four
of the small boys had hives from over-indulgence, so bountifully did
Nature provide, so many did the seven chipmunks leave us!
Peace between me and the chipmunks had been signed before the
strawberry season closed, and the pact still holds. Other things have
occurred since to threaten it, however. Among them, an article in a
recent number of an out-of-door magazine, of wide circulation. Herein
the chipmunk family was most roundly rated, in fact condemned to
annihilation because of its wicked taste for birds’ eggs and for the
young birds. Numerous photographs accompanied the article, showing the
red squirrel with eggs in his mouth, but no such proof (even the red
squirrel photographs, I strongly believe, were done from a _stuffed_
squirrel) of Chipmunk’s guilt, though he was counted equally bad and,
doubtless, will suffer with Chickaree at the hands of those who have
taken the article seriously.
I believe that would be a great mistake. Indeed, I believe the article
a deliberate falsehood, concocted in order to sell the made-up
photographs. Chipmunk is not an egg-sucker, else I should have found
it out. But of course that does not mean that no one else has found it
out. It does mean, however, that if Chipmunk robs at all he does it so
seldom as to call for no alarm or retribution.
There is scarcely a day in the nesting-season when I fail to see half
a dozen chipmunks about the walls, yet I have never noticed one even
suspiciously near a bird’s nest. In an apple tree, scarcely six jumps
from the home of the family in the orchard wall, a brood of tree
swallows came to wing this spring; while robins, chippies, and
red-eyed vireos--not to mention a cowbird, which I wish they had
devoured--have also hatched and flown away from nests that these
squirrels might easily have rifled.
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 are discovered to me by the
cries of the birds that they are robbing. So is it with the cats. No
creature larger than a June-bug, however, is often 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. Does not that pile of June-bug bodies on
the flat stone leave me still in debt to him? 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 havoc certain chipmunks in the mountains once made among our
possessions was 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 was a rough log cabin on
the side of Thorn Mountain. What sort of table-cloth 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 table-cloth 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 that their manner is in
the least the manner of thieves. 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 the quantity of oats they have carried off--anywhere, I
should say, from a peck to a bushel, which they have 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 market-place 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 in return 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 crop of 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 a chipmunk in it
and one without. Just the difference, relatively speaking, between the
house with my four boys in it, and the house without.
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 the
friendliest of my birds--Chickadee. The two are very much alike in
spirit; but however tame and confiding Chickadee may become, he is
still a bird and belongs to a different and, despite his wings, 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.
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. One or another of them, sitting upon the high flat slab, sees me
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 motion,
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
until he came 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. No, he did not drown, but his curiosity did get a ducking.
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 we 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 chipmunks 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
things I should like to know.
When the first frosts come, the family--if they are still a
family--seek the nest in the ground beneath the stone wall. But they
do not go to sleep immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet
been closed. There is still plenty of fresh air and, of course, plenty
of food--acorns, chestnuts, hickory-nuts, and oats. They doze quietly
for a time and then they eat, pushing the empty shells and hulls into
some side passage prepared beforehand to receive the débris.
But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth
overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off
the supply of fresh air; and one day, though not sound sleepers, the
family cuddle down and forget to wake entirely until the frost has
begun to creep back toward the surface, and in through the softened
soil is felt the thrill of the waking spring.