IN FIELD AND WOOD 



To settle the point as to whether or not the chip- 

 munk has a back door, which in no case had I been 

 able to find, we dug out the one by the roadside, 

 whose mound of earth we could not discover. We 

 followed his tortuous course through the soil three 

 or four feet from the entrance and nearly three feet 

 beneath the surface, where we found him in his 

 chamber, warm in his nest of leaves, but not asleep. 

 He had no back door. He came out (it was a male) 

 as a hand was thrust into his chamber, and the same 

 fearless, strong hand seized him, but did not hurt 

 him. His chamber was spacious enough to hold about 

 four quarts of winter stores and leave him consider- 

 able room to stir about in. His supplies consisted of 

 the seeds of the wild buckwheat (Polygonum du- 

 metorum) and choke-cherry pits, and formed a very 

 unpromising looking mess. His buckwheat did 

 not seem to have been properly cured, for much of 

 it was mouldy, but it had been carefully cleaned, 

 every kernel of it. There were nearly four quarts of 

 seeds altogether, and over one half of it was wild 

 buckwheat. I was curious to know approximately 

 the number of these seeds he had gathered and 

 shucked. I first found the number it took to fill a 

 lady's thimble, and then the number of thimbles 



of earth which a chipmunk had removed from his den, contain- 

 ing a stone too large to go into the hole, yet the most careful 

 examination failed to reveal that there had ever been any 

 groove cut in it, or that it had ever been in any way enlarged. 



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