CHINK AND THE PICKET-PINS

As already noted in the Coyote chapter, we had in camp that summer the
little dog called Chink. He was just old enough to think himself a
remarkable dog with a future before him. There was hardly anything that
Chink would not attempt, except perhaps keeping still. He was always
trying to do some absurd and impossible thing, or, if he did attempt the
possible, he usually spoiled his best efforts by his way of going about
it. He once spent a whole morning trying to run up a tall, straight,
pine tree in whose branches was a snickering Pine Squirrel.

The darling ambition of his life for some weeks was to catch one of the
Picket-pin Ground-squirrels that swarmed on the prairie about the camp.

Chink had determined to catch one of these Ground-squirrels the very
first day he came into the valley. Of course, he went about it in his
own original way, doing everything wrong end first, as usual. This, his
master said, was due to a streak of Irish in his makeup. So Chink would
begin a most elaborate stalk a quarter of a mile from the
Ground-squirrel. After crawling on his breast from tussock to tussock
for a hundred yards or so, the nervous strain would become too great,
and Chink, getting too much excited to crawl, would rise on his feet and
walk straight toward the Squirrel, which would now be sitting up by its
hole, fully alive to the situation.

After a minute or two of this very open approach, Chink's excitement
would overpower all caution. He would begin running, and at the last,
just as he should have done his finest stalking, he would go bounding
and barking toward the Ground-squirrel, which would sit like a peg of
wood till the proper moment, then dive below with a derisive chirrup,
throwing with its hind feet a lot of sand right into Chink's eager, open
mouth.

Day after day this went on with level sameness, and still Chink did not
give up, although I feel sure he had bushels of sand thrown in his mouth
that summer by the impudent Picket-pins.

[Illustration]

Perseverance, he seemed to believe, must surely win in the end, as
indeed it did. For, one day, he made an unusually elaborate stalk after
an unusually fine big Picket-pin, carried out all his absurd tactics,
finishing with the grand, boisterous charge, and actually caught his
victim; but this time it happened to be a _wooden_ picket-pin. Any one
who doubts that a dog knows when he has made a fool of himself should
have see