Chipmunk Days

By Annita Sawyer


I entered the website by accident. I’d been bored and decided to check out Wikipedia for small mammals and insects. I wasn’t anticipating a problem when I double-clicked on an interesting-sounding link: Your Year of Personal Experience. The site opened to a page that appeared to be a collage of cute little animals and bugs, arranged as if they were family photos. “This could be you,” read the heading, in pretty script. “Pick one.” I wasn’t paying much attention to the exact location of the cursor, and I clicked on a cluster of fleas.

Two commands at the bottom of the flea page gave me the first hint of trouble: regress or proceed were my only choices. The first was accompanied by a warning: return to previous page might result in elimination of all stored applications in your hard drive; once lost, this material will be irretrievable. Are you sure you want to choose regress? I was terrified that I’d lose all of my work— especially that business plan I’d worked so hard on; it was due the next day—so I hit proceed. I’ve been stuck in this Alien Incarnation Experience (AIE) ever since.

I spent the first month as a flea. Fortunately, I’d had an easy ride inside the forward right armpit of a black lab, tucked too far up behind her leg for her to scratch or lick me off. With the blood in such easy reach I was well fed, and I’d laid close to five hundred eggs
before I moved on. Not bad for a middle-aged guy. Gender flexibility seemed to be part of the deal.

I drew the chipmunk assignment just before Halloween. I’d never given a lot of thought to  chipmunks before that, although when we were kids my sister and I used to pack our faces with marshmallows and pretend we were storing up for hibernation.

November’s a bit late in the year for chipmunks, and I’m not sure this was a good choice, but here I am, out on a larding expedition, with instructions to fill up my shopping- cart cheeks with as many items as I can find in this backyard supermarket and return to the burrow before dark. So far, I’ve had luck with a batch of seeds and a red fungus on the oak tree; I have three worms and a large pile of acorn chunks abandoned by some squirrels. I’m in a hurry to get this home safely and call it a day.

The weather was nasty last week: the long rain had made the ground soggy, and I’d had to grab nuts through mud. I was used to skimming along on top of the ground; instead, I kept finding myself inside a puddle. A few times the water reached up to my eyes, and twice it was over my head. I’d lose my bearings and sometimes my load. “Chipmunk life is for the birds,” was my enlightened assessment.

I’d been trying to catch up this week, since I knew winter was coming and the store would close soon. The rain was good for fungus, and it brought out the worms. I was doing well making up for lost time until yesterday, when I encountered a nightmare I can’t seem to forget. It concerned a cat.

My neighborhood is under some holly bushes set in the woodsy back yard of a brown colonial. It’s a great area for basics: lots of acorns, seeds of all sorts, worms, bugs, and fungus galore. You have to watch out for owls—we lost five youngsters from the burrow this past summer alone, and I understand that it gets riskier as the vegetation dies back in the cold.

Yesterday, as I was making my rounds, I stopped to take advantage of an attractive pile of acorn scraps near the ramp that leads down from the house’s back deck. I’d eaten a few tasty beetles before that, and I might have been a bit sluggish from my feast. One minute I was packing my cheeks with acorns and the next I was waving in the air, dangling by my neck from the jaws of a huge multicolored cat. The pinching sensation behind my ears wasn’t too bad, or possibly it didn’t register due to my focus on the trip through the air. I knew the drill for this sort of thing: the next step after the frantic waving around is to go limp. There’s a nice rhythm to a running cat, and swinging back and forth reminded me of when I used to go dancing.

But the sparkle soon went out of this dance. Changing from her easy jog, the cat began to move over an incline in an upward direction with short angular bursts. My body zigged when the cat zagged, and I felt myself bounce off the corner of a large structure I took to be the house. I found myself being whaled against some rattly plastic, and then—pow!—I was inside a large room. The rhythmic gait picked up for a few seconds, I heard a growl from across the room, then some scurrying, an abrupt turn, and we were flying down a hall and up a long flight of stairs, the growling party apparently following in hot pursuit. I could hear an answering growl and feel it transferred to my body through vibrations in the teeth clamped onto my neck. Like a giant loco-motive rumbling out of nowhere, it scared the devil out of me. Pungent, steamy air filled the space around my head—cat breath. I began to feel sick. The growling intensified. This near to the source, it sounded like a serious thunder storm had arrived, and I braced for the lightening. The cat gave her head a shake. I flipped up like a pancake, then bounced onto the floor.

The humid breath of two hissing, grumbling cats took on a thick intestinal quality that almost distracted me from the realization that here was my chance: I could run. I dashed blindly at first and hit a wall, but upon turnaround I zipped through an open door into a room with a huge dark colored item—I figured later it must have been a bureau—sitting on four legs low off the floor. I ducked underneath it to catch my breath in the midst of dust bundles, a few scraps of paper crumpled into balls, a broken pencil, and a political button showing a flowing American flag with “Peace is Patriotic” written on it. Two sets of whiskers and paws set up stations on opposite sides of the bureau, just outside my sanctuary.  I froze. A batch of ant-sized black dots appeared in the mix around me.

A long time passed without any action. The room was becoming dark. I heard human voices in the distance, and the whiskers and paws left the scene. I took a deep breath and decided to go for it. I rushed toward an open space outside of the room, ran along a corridor, down stairs that went on forever, through another dark hall, and across a brightly lit room toward a place that showed some sky and trees.

“There it is!” a great clatter and scratching as legs and shoes and paws with claws converged in this space that I soon discovered put glass walls between me and those blessed trees I had seen from a distance. Fortunately, there were several low-set pieces of furniture around the room. I barely could fit underneath the largest, but once there I was glad to be covered. By this point, I was so frightened that I was ready to let myself be devoured rather than continue the suspense. Before I could complete that thought, the horde of mammals had started poking around the area with sticks, trying to find me and scrape me out. I was a goner for sure.

“Wait!” a woman said emphatically. “Leave this to me. Everyone out.” The cloud of noise and legs and fur moved off. The woman returned immediately; the action resumed. Her sneakers squeaked on the tile floor as she maneuvered into corners. I could hear scraping and felt myself slid from my seat under the couch, jolted into the wall. I righted myself and made a quick ascent into the handy metal wall heater set near the floor. She must have heard me and arrived to stand close to my head. She stood very still; I don’t think she saw me. She must have gotten tired of waiting, so she banged on the heater. It was like a bomb going off, and the shock of the metal reverberations sent me scurrying out before I gave it any thought. Womp! I found myself inside a rectangular brown plastic container. I scrambled up the sides but fell back quickly, because there was no traction. She held a magazine over the top, so I couldn’t pop out.

“Okay, Chipmunky,” she said. “Let’s get you outdoors.” I didn’t know whether to give thanks or to cry. “Chipmunky.” Can you imagine? She shooed the cats away, as I bounced through the house in her plastic waste basket. It shot up into the air, then jerked down, as her arms underlined each “Shoo” and “Scram” with emphatic gestures. I heard a few doors slam; the air turned markedly colder. She slowed down, lifted off the magazine, and, holding the container close to the ground, she dumped me out into some pachysandra. “Good luck, Sweetie,” she called to me in a sing-songy voice, like I was some eight-year-old heading off on a field trip.

The ground cover was lush and green. I had never felt anything so cool and beautiful. Even though I was banged up and wiped out from my recent travails, I could move easily under-neath it, and I ran as fast as I could away from her. It took me a while, because I was badly disoriented, and it was dark, but eventually I made it back to the burrow, where I collapsed into blessed sleep.

I have less than two weeks left of this chipmunk incarnation, and I can’t be done with it soon enough. Being an AIE participant is more than I bargained for. True, I’m learning about life from a variety of interesting perspectives. On the other hand, one or two days would surely be enough to do it. I was willing to learn how the rest of the world lived, but I didn’t want to really know.

I’ve justified the inevitable by deciding that this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. At least I’m only in for the short course—six months. I’ve done almost two, with four more to go.  And there is some good news: next month I’m going to be a cat.



Published April 2007