A clear start to a day due for clouds and warmth. A chipmunk races over the snow, tail like the hand of a timer that just went off.
chipmunks
Partly sunny and cold. The kak-kak-kak of a Cooper’s hawk up in the woods. Polyrhythms of scolding chipmunks.
Gray sky gravid with bad weather. On either side of the road, the tall grass trembles: foraging chipmunks.
Brightening sky. I watch a chipmunk on the wall beside the porch making her “chuck” call, so loud—using the stone as a resonator.
Waiting for rain, everything sounds like an augury—catbird, chipmunk, great-crested flycatcher—and just before the first drops, that hush.
The forest is so green it almost hurts to look at it, and it smells delicious, too: wild azalea’s honeysuckle scent. Two chipmunks’ warring metronomes.
Almost warm, and the sky almost clear. Two chipmunks sit two feet apart on top of the wall, staring off in different directions.
Sunny but cold. The woods-edge chipmunk scuttles back and forth. Tips of dead grasses hanging into the stream have new feet of ice.
The glare ice between the trees flickers as a tiny figure races across it: the first chipmunk! Soon in furious pursuit of the second.
The tock-tock-tock of a chipmunk up in the woods, relentless as a metronome. A red-tailed hawk lands in an oak and has a slow look around.
Chipmunks chatter alarm up in the woods, and a moment later the squirrels. I remember the terrified bleating I heard at 1:30 in the morning.
Sky and ground both flat white. A squirrel missing a quarter of her tail is fossicking through the snow, ignored by a high-speed chipmunk.
Overcast. A song sparrow’s song. Chipmunks break their habitual solitude to dash across the hard snowpack, fighting, looking for mates.
Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I watch a chipmunk awoken from hibernation racing from covert to covert through the inch-deep snow.