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Franklin's Spermophile — Part 2
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The alarm is taken up by the others as fast as they catch sight of the fox, so that the most wily marauder finds his approach heralded in spite of all his caution.
When one is directly attacked and compelled to dart into his hole or seek safety among the rocks, a shrill, rippling, sibilant cry informs his fellows still more exactly of the position of the enemy. One afternoon last September I heard them signalling danger from one to another at the edge of the woods, and approached cautiously, rather expecting to find a fox hunting them, for the jays by their screaming gave me reason to believe that there was one near-by.
Just as I reached the group of hardwood trees where the chipmunks were, a cooper's hawk swooped down from among the leaves overhead and gliding along beside the stone wall struck at first one and then another of the little striped backs, but they all dodged him successfully each sending along the alarm to the next as he disappeared. The hawk vanished among the trees and evidently succeeded in deceiving the squirrels into thinking that he had betaken himself to other hunting grounds, for after perhaps ten minutes of anxious shouting between neighbouring doorways they quieted down and resumed the interrupted course of their affairs; some of them searching about in the short grass for beechnuts dropped by the jays, while others started on longer excursions through the woods and a few of the younger ones began playing together among the last year's leaves beside the wall.
But one or two took prominent positions on the highest stones of the wall as if standing sentinel, and at pretty regular intervals called a warning to the others, or perhaps it was the cry of "All's well," for by this time even the jays appeared to have forgotten the danger and were chuckling and squealing among themselves as they gathered beechnuts overhead.
None of them apparently paid any attention to the angry stuttering of a red squirrel in a great oak, and I am inclined to believe that red squirrels, like the shepherd boy in the fable, have so often cried wolf without cause that the other wood-dwellers have learned to distrust them.
But this one evidently knew what he was about and a sudden hysterical explosion in the midst of his clamour and then silence was followed by the reappearance of the hawk from his ambush among the oak leaves dashing this way and that after the scattering chipmunks. He failed, however, as before in each attempt, and, as if mistrusting that the red squirrel might be the cause of all his ill luck, rose in the air and rushed headlong at him as he clung to the under side of the branch. There was a short and very exciting chase before the squirrel succeeded in reaching the safety of his hole and the hawk flapped away disappointed.
The winter hibernation of the chipmunk is much like that of the dormouse of the Old World, though unlike the dormouse and most other hibernating animals, chipmunks are seldom more than comfortably fat on retiring in the autumn.
As several weeks are generally believed to elapse before the final sleep of winter overtakes them, it is quite probable that they occupy themselves in the meantime with acquiring a sufficient amount of fat to carry them on until spring.
In April and May chipmunks are pretty sure to be out in the sunshine of every warm day we have, to retire and become dormant again, like the dormouse, at the approach of a cold wave or snow weather.
Those first few weeks of confinement in November must be a strange experience for such an active sun-loving creature as the chipmunk. To go down out of the bright October sunlight into a chamber utterly devoid of any light of any kind, there to remain groping about in the dark among its companions, squeezing through narrow side passages, depending on food packed away in the nest itself or in side galleries branching off from the main chamber, eating and sleeping in those cramped quarters and getting ever drowsier and drowsier, at last losing consciousness altogether, to awake and become aware in some inexplicable manner that it is time to come out into the daylight once more--this, indeed, must be a life of strange contrasts.
But while the dormouse is supposed to be chronically sleepy at all times, owing probably to its fondness for being abroad at night and sleeping all day, even in the longest days of summer, the chipmunk, when it is awake, is most unmistakably awake from sunrise to sunset, apparently without even a nap at midday when the days are at their longest and hottest.