en it sounded as if he were a good way
off, he was really close by.

Beside these songs, A-bal-ka had an odd way of saying chip,
chur-r-r-r-r, when he was scared. This meant, "I am not afraid of you,"
and he never said it till he was safe in some hole where no one could
get at him.

A-bal-ka never harmed any one, nor did he scold and steal like Mee-ko
the Red Squirrel. Yet he had many foes. Ko-ko-ka the Owl, Ak-sip the
Hawk, Kee-wuk the Fox, Kag-ax the Weasel, Ko-sa the Mink, and A-tos-sa
the Snake were always ready to pounce upon him at sight and make a
meal of him. Even Mee-ko was not to be trusted. Sometimes he would
chase A-bal-ka and rob him of the nuts which he was carrying to his
storehouse. He would have robbed the storehouse, too, if he could have
got into it. But A-bal-ka's door was too small, and his hallways too
narrow for Mee-ko.

Little Luke knew all about A-bal-ka's underground dwelling. The way he
found out was this: Uncle Mark and Sam the hired man were digging stones
on the hillside in the edge of the woods for the foundations of a new
barn. While at this work, they uncovered the home of one of A-bal-ka's
brothers. It was made up of a long, winding passageway, ending in a
sleeping chamber, near which was a storehouse, and in this storehouse
there was a large quantity of nuts. These nuts were all good ones. The
greater part of them were little, three-cornered beech nuts, which the
squirrels like better than anything else. In all there was as much as
half a bushel of nuts, enough to last a chipmunk all winter. The bedroom
was a neat, little, round chamber, nicely filled with leaves, grass, and
moss. In such a house as this, with its store of nuts, a chipmunk could
live snug and warm all winter long and come out sleek and fat in the
spring.

Because of A-bal-ka's many enemies, he was very watchful. He seldom went
far from home, and when he did venture to go abroad, he nearly always
followed the same path. At first it ran along under the side of a fallen
log. From the end of this, a few quick leaps carried him to a brush
pile. A jump or two more brought him to a rock and yet a few more to a
stone fence. Once there, he felt safe. At the least alarm, he could run
into a hole too small for any of his foes except, perhaps, A-tos-sa,
whom he dreaded more than any of the others.

All along the stone fence stood nut trees,--oaks, hazels, walnuts,
beeches, and others. And at one end was a cornfield.

This