I used to hike along a forest trail that cut through the property of an absentee landowner. It was a steep ATV track that was used only during that week-long madness that is the modern firearms season for white-tailed deer in West Virginia. The other 51 weeks of the year it was wilderness reclaiming itself.
The ATV track switch-backed down a steep hill that led a nicely bass pond, where you could see the largemouths swimming in the crystal clearness of the spring that fed the impoundment. I never fished there, but I knew of people near me who came down to that pond to poach and loaf and be in nature for a couple of hours.
When I went, I usually had a dog in tow, usually poor old Miley, the golden retriever that didn’t much like to swim and preferred to use ponds for her mud baths on sultry summer days. I could clear out my head and breathe in the sweet air and dream a bit and compose essays in my head, which I am constantly doing, even when I probably shouldn’t.
Sometimes, my approach would lift a band of deer from their sleeping beds in the heavy cover. Many times, I’d accidentally jump a wily grouse from its covert, it’s loud wings drumming wildly as it soared up from the thorny bush and then casting about in the air around the trees and out of my clear view.
And I always came across the sign of bobcat, gray and red fox, and Eastern coyote. Their tracks and scat would litter the ATV trail, calling cards of species that knew damned well to keep as far of the trail as possible when the sound of human footsteps plooded the muddy tracks and rustled the invasive Japanese stiltgrass that festooned the whole tram road.
A whole world of creatures existed that never revealed themselves when I graced the scene, and I felt a certain amount of sadness that I never got to see them, only their scat and paw prints in the mud.
But one creature always turned up on my walks. The only exception to this rule was when I was out in the dead of winter, and these creatures were deep in their hibernation dens.
I am, of course, talking about the Eastern chipmunks, those “striped squirrels” that run around on the ground, often darting out without consideration about where they were going, just running first and then dealing with the consequences later.
When they dart out, they usually would let loose a trilling alarm call, then dive among the furrows of some ancient sandstone boulders. The boulders were the castle forts, and this was their little fiefdom. If I approached, they would dart out, trill, and take for the boulder furrows.
I came to see them as the most banal of creatures, but they are at the same time exquisitely marked little things. They are chestnut brown, with a dark stripe running down their backs, and a white stripe running down each side, bracketed at the top and bottom with dark stripes running parallel to the white one. Their doe-eyes are brown and softly sweet, almost like a nice Cavalier King King Charles spaniel, and that softness is further accentuated with the white stripes running just above and below each eye. A black stripe runs behind the eye, making it look as if the little squirrel were wearing some kind of mascara.
In my childhood, I had known dogs that would give a chipmunk a good chase. The old golden retriever Strawberry was a lazy sort of dog, but in her youth, the one thing that her charging like a predatory beast was the trilling alarm call of the chipmunk. And she would dive after them running them to their lairs and then bark in her hoarse, raspy bark that was her calling card that she had found the quarry’s lair and the world needed to know.
But most dogs give up chipmunk hunts when they hit maturity. The chipmunks run too stupidly to give much of a chase, and they take refuge in places that most dogs don’t want enter. They usually run for boulders or take refuge in some mislaid pipe. And if a dog catches one, it is so easily dispatched, and there is not much meat on the animal at all.
So most chipmunk dogs discover that gray squirrels and cottontail rabbits are better things to chase.
I’m sure the bobcats and gray foxes did take a few chipmunks every year. A gray fox in particular is well-suited to hunting this kind of quarry, and they are small enough to get a decent amount of their daily caloric intake from catching such a minuscule bit of prey.
But the real enemy of the chipmunks in the boulders was a species of snake that everyone in West Virginia just called a “black snake,” and that I usually just called a “black rat snake.” The exact species I encountered is currently a taxonomic boondoggle, and in some quarters, it would be better called a “gray rat snake,” even though its body is mostly obsidian shiny black.
These are the great predatory snakes of most of the Eastern US. They grow quite long– five or six feet is not unusual. And the boulders full of chipmunks drew in more than a few of these slinking customers. Many times, I’d be walking along and hear the leaf litter crinkle so softly. And I would turn my head and see the form of a great serpent slipping out of my view.
Sometimes, I’d catch them sunning themselves along the ATV trail, and then they would coil up and flash the white scales of their necks and underjaws at me. And they would buzz their tail tips in the leaf litter to make it seem as though I’d come across a very large timber rattlesnake, which also often comes in that same obsidian black color.
And I would always notice the lumps in their coils. The snakes had been able to make their way through the furrows on the boulders and thus scale the castle fortress of the chipmunk fiefdom.
And so they were the dragons in our tale, true monsters of death for the striped squirrel lords of the manor.
My wanderings along this road, though, were cut short. One of the sons of the landowner came back to his family’s little wilderness farm, and set about putting up posted signs. He bought a bunch of chickens and filled an oak lot with swine. And turned out a white German shepherd to guard it all.
One day, a few big sows took down the fence, and several dozen hogs and weaner pigs took off for the country.
Most of them were rounded up within a week, but a few of the wily ones lived up in the woods, wandering over the big acreages of oak and hickory until the madness of deer season started.
And the deer hunters, smarting from a lack of deer to shoot, found that forest grown hams on the finest of Allegheny Plateau pannage was quite a nice treat.
I am sure the chipmunks still hold court among the boulders. I bet I could step out there on a chilly crisp day in October, and I could hear their little popping calls as they flitted from oak to hickory back to oak. I bet they still use the boulders as their little castle forts.
And I bet the black snakes slip among the boulders and take the odd chipmunk from its sandstone refuge.
And life goes on in the microcosm where I used to tread daily.
And will go on so long as there are oaks and hickories to drop mast, and boulders with deep furrows for sprightly ground squirrels to take as their castles.
