Happy Jack

HAPPY JACK SPIES ON STRIPED CHIPMUNK

It’s more important to mind your own affairs than to know what your neighbors are doing, but not nearly so interesting.

Happy Jack.

Striped Chipmunk was whisking about among the brown-and-yellow leaves that covered the ground on the edge of the Green Forest.  He is such a little fellow that he looked almost like a brown leaf himself, and when one of Old Mother West Wind’s Merry Little Breezes whirled the brown leaves in a mad little dance around him, it was the hardest work in the world to see Striped Chipmunk at all.  Anyway, Happy Jack Squirrel found it so.

You see, Happy Jack was spying on Striped Chipmunk.  Yes, Sir, Happy Jack was spying.  Spying, you know, is secretly watching other people and trying to find out what they are doing.  It isn’t a nice thing to do, not a bit nice.  Happy Jack knew it, and all the time he was doing it, he was feeling very much ashamed of himself.  But he said to himself that he just had to know where Striped Chipmunk’s storehouse was, because he just had to peep inside and find out if it held any of the big, fat hickory nuts that had disappeared from under the tall hickory tree while he was quarreling up in the top of it with his cousin, Chatterer the Red Squirrel.

But spying on Striped Chipmunk isn’t the easiest thing in the world.  Happy Jack was finding it the hardest work he had ever undertaken.  Striped Chipmunk is so spry, and whisks about so, that you need eyes all around your head to keep track of him.  Happy Jack found that his two eyes, bright and quick as they are, couldn’t keep that little elf of a cousin of his always in sight.  Every few minutes he would disappear and then bob up again in the most unexpected place and most provoking way.

    “Now I’m here, and now I’m there! 
    Now I am not anywhere! 
    Watch me now, for here I go
    Out of sight!  I told you so!”

With the last words, Striped Chipmunk was nowhere to be seen.  It seemed as if the earth must have opened and swallowed him.  But it hadn’t, for two minutes later Happy Jack saw him flirting his funny little tail in the sauciest way as he scampered along an old log.

Happy Jack began to suspect that Striped Chipmunk was just having fun with him.  What else could he mean by saying such things?  And yet Happy Jack was sure that Striped Chipmunk hadn’t seen him, for, all the time he was watching, Happy Jack had taken the greatest care to keep hidden himself.  No, it couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be that Striped Chipmunk knew that he was anywhere about.  He would just be patient a little longer, and he would surely see that smart little cousin of his go to his storehouse.  So Happy Jack waited and watched.