ping
every few yards to see that the way is clear, but giving little
heed to me or to the performing squirrel. In comparison the
chipmunk is a demure, preoccupied, pretty little busybody who
often watches you curiously, but never mocks you or pokes fun at
you; while the gray squirrel has the manners of the best-bred
wood-folk, and he goes his way without fuss or bluster, a picture
of sylvan grace and buoyancy.

All the movements of the red squirrel are quick, sharp, jerky,
machine-like. He does nothing slowly or gently; everything with a
snap and a jerk. His progression is a series of interrupted
sallies. When he pauses on the stone wall he faces this way and
that with a sudden jerk; he turns round in two or three quick
leaps. So abrupt and automatic in his movements, so stiff and
angular in behavior, yet he is charged and overflowing with life
and energy. One thinks of him as a bundle of steel wires and
needles and coiled springs, all electrically charged. One of his
sounds or calls is like the buzz of a reel or the whirr of an
alarm-clock. Something seems to touch a spring there in the old
apple-tree, and out leaps this strident sound as of spinning
brass wheels.

When I speak sharply to him, in the midst of his antics, he
pauses a moment with uplifted paw, watching me intently, and then
with a snicker springs upon a branch of an apple-tree that hangs
down near the wall, and disappears amid the foliage. The red
squirrel is always actively saucy, aggressively impudent. He
peeps in at me through a broken pane in the window and snickers;
he strikes up a jig on the stone underpinning twenty feet away
and mocks; he darts in and out among the timbers and chatters and
giggles; he climbs up over the door, pokes his head in, and lets
off a volley; he moves by jerks along the sill a few feet from my
head and chirps derisively; he eyes me from points on the wall in
front, or from some coign of vantage in the barn, and flings his
anger or his contempt upon me.

No other of our wood-folk has such a facile, emotional tail as
the red squirrel. It seems as if an electric current were running
through it most of the time; it vibrates, it ripples, it curls,
it jerks, it arches, it flattens; now it is like a plume in his
cap; now it is a cloak around his shoulders; then it is an
instrument to point and emphasize his states of emotional
excitement; every movement of his body is seconded or reflected
in his tail. There seems to be s