Chipmunks
As some of the inhabitants of sea and shore move on to the south, inland life adjusts itself to local climate. The leaves on the trees are still green, but the bracken, or dry land fern, has turned brown, one of the early signs of autumn. My surroundings are full of statements of this kind, an end result of preparation. I notice one of them. I stop—pleased to be told—and then I wonder what was silently going on in August to have placed us with such definition in September. Plants and animals move into a new light, a new scene, when I am merely groping with their names. Perhaps because I have read too many newspapers, I am limited to what we call events. I see some outward evidence, and am obliged to go backward in order to reconstruct what might have been, when the real show is already over.
So all September’s reassociations and revolutions may just end up for me as a clump of locust leaves tugged loose by the wind, or the sudden opening in a milkweed pod, or a new chill in the air. One day I notice that a milkweed pod—on the same plant where I saw the butterflies—erect like a lamp on its bent stem, has developed a dimpled line down the middle. The next day it has cracked apart, and there in the sheath are the compact seeds, overlapping like fish scales, making a kind of cone with a tail of soft silk made up of myriads of threads. They are moist at first, in their womb, then they dry out and each seed parachutes away, the silky rays darting, swirling, racing high, subject to every turn and twist of air. There will be new populations, out of old circumstances. What happened to the milkweed before this culmination? How many hairstreak and monarch butterflies paid it a visit? How did it change with change in temperature and moisture and length of days? Where did it come from originally? Next year, if I have not been sent ahead myself, I will stand watch over the plant so as not to miss what might be the greatest show on earth.
We depend on all too occasional visits to understand other modes and rhythms of existence with any depth, although there are times when a chance sight goes deep enough to last. This season of the year the chipmunks are very active, foraging for grains and nuts to store in their hibernation chambers underground. Cats, of which there are far too many loose on the Cape, kill so many chipmunks that it is sometimes hard to see how the population keeps up. (For one thing, these little “ground squirrels” only seem to have one brood a year.) Cats bring them home almost daily, teased into a terrible dance, spinning around like weary boxers on a revolving stage. A chipmunk’s alert curiosity, or habit of freezing into attention, may well be its most vulnerable point. Cats will get them when they are out in the open filling their cheeks with food. They will also come out of the shelter of a hole, or stone wall, to investigate the source of some unusual noise or light tapping, or a whistle, or just stay fixed when a man approaches, in a kind of actively questioning mood.
I hear a scattered dashing in the leaves, and there it is—a striped, bright-looking little animal, tail twitching, arrested in motion, quivering and throbbing, its throat pulsing at a furious rate. We watch each other for three or four minutes. I too have my share of curiosity. Gradually its quick pulsing dies down. It turns its head slightly away, with those moist, black, intent little eyes. With a quick flip it is around a tree, then drops down to run along the leaves again and jump behind a boulder.
It was in no mortal danger that time, but our two lives were brought together into relationship by another danger—the dark universe of chance. I felt it as almost a kind of love between strangers, in which my mental being was in no way divorced from what might lie behind a chipmunk’s eye.
I remember another chipmunk, in Vermont this time, whose chosen ground was a hillside pasture. I came on the animal when it was carrying part of an apple up a slope toward its hole, located in the side of a ridge some twenty feet above an old apple tree. When it saw me it dropped the apple, which promptly rolled downhill. Then it watched me with that silent waiting on chance, that throbbing look of expectation which they have, one paw twitching slightly and clutched to its chest. I was quiet, and at a respectable distance, so the chipmunk picked up its food again and hurried back to the hole; but the apple was too big to go in, and it rolled back downhill. This happened four times. The apple rolled down. The chipmunk hauled it back up, turned it around, put it up against the hole, a little like a man facing the problem of moving a large bed through a narrow door. Finally it nibbled bits off the edge, slipped sideways into the hole, and pulled the apple in after it. I stole up as quietly as I could and saw that it was eating away successfully with its food overhead. A problem had been solved, and with a fair amount of intelligence.
The illumination we find in nature does not necessarily come from comparing degrees of intelligence, in which man always finds himself the winner. The light goes deeper. Our analytical ways, our methods of order, imitate an order which is indefinitely resourceful. Sometimes it shows itself past explanation. It is like this September evening after rain. For a short time, ten minutes perhaps, not long before dark, the earth is colored with magic, shadowless light. The grass is intensely green. The sky turns gray and pink. Distant fields are red and astonishingly bright. All colors are sure and strong, joining in pure gradations. The evening is full of mystic peace. A kitten watches the light, transfixed in the doorway (together, for all I know, with some chipmunk by the stone wall outside), arrested by what I in my own silence can only think of as an unmatchable glory, never to return in quite the same measure.