CHAPTER XI
CHUCK AND CHIPPER
THE little brown bear spent much of his first summer chasing chipmunks, but these squirrel-like orange and black striped fellows were too quick for Fuzzy-Wuzz.
The pretty creatures lived along the rock ledges and manzanita bushes that surrounded the Ranger’s cabin. Chuck and Chipper were two young chipmunks who had been born that spring. Now their mother had a second brood and left them pretty much to themselves.
My, what fun they had playing tag and stuffing their cheeks with everything good to eat they could find! Their cheeks were built like pockets and extended away down the sides of their necks. All the long, sunny days they explored the interestingworld in which they found themselves,—a world of good things to eat.
So tiny and mouselike were they that Fuzzy would have liked a taste of them, even if there were plenty of green things to eat, but the awkward, flat-footed, four months’ cub could not catch them.
The children, too, tried to capture a chipmunk, just for the fun of holding it in their hands for a minute. The boy had a cracker box that he placed upside down on the ground, then propped it open a crack with a stick. To this stick he tied a long string. Strewing the ground under the box with peanuts, he waited behind a tree till a chipmunk came and began stuffing his cheeks with the nuts. Then he jerked the string, and the box came down and made a prisoner of him. It was Chuck, who went about all day with his cheerful “chuck, chuck, chuck!”
The boy, holding his cloth hat in readiness, lifted the box a crack and Chuck dashed from under, but only to find himself in the hat crown. The next thing he knew, the boy was stroking his back withone finger. Did he bite? Not the least little bit in the world. Chuck never tries to fight any one. His safety lies in running away when danger threatens. He only cowered down, quaking, with fear, his warm, furry sides panting hotly.
Until he could make a cage, the boy tethered him out on a leash, on a string as long as the cabin kitchen, and left him with a handful of peanuts. But the prisoner was too frightened to eat. He was even more so when he was turned loose in the cracker box, across the open side of which the boy had tacked a piece of screen wire. He only crept to the darkest corner, under a lettuce leaf, and wondered if he were ever again to go racing through the green woods in the sunshine.
The boy did not mean to keep him a prisoner, but the little captive did not understand.
Curiously Chuck’s brother, Chipper, peered at him from the top of a stump. “I told you not to go into that box,” he chippered in a frightened chirp. “Now whatare you going to do?” Just then he saw the little girl coming, and he whisked away under a stone.
All would have been well, she would not even have looked his way, had he not lost his nerve at the very moment she was passing, and begun his frightened chippering. Quick as a flash she had thrown her sunbonnet over rocks and all, and the next thing he knew, she had put him in the box with Chuck.
“Well, at least there are two of us,” Chuck tried to find a bright spot in the situation. And he felt so much better that he began to eat and drink. Then the night grew chilly, and they wadded the paper with which the box was carpeted into a sort of hay stack of paper wads, and burrowed inside it, all cuddled together into a ball to keep warm.
But Chipper did not have the heart to eat. Three days later he was so feeble from lack of food and exercise that he could hardly crawl. The boy, seeing this, opened the cage door and let them out.After all, he told his sister, they had not been half so much fun as when they had been racing mischievously all over the place.