44



CIRCUIT OF THE SUMMER HILLS

A buttemut-tree stands across the road in front
of Woodchuck Lodge. One season the red squirrels
stored the butternuts in the wall of one of the upper
rooms of the unoccupied house, to which they
gained access through a hole in the siding. When we
moved in, in the summer, the squirrels soon became
uneasy, and one day one of them began removing
the butternuts, not to some other granary or place
of safety, but to the grass and dry leaves on the
ground in the orchard. He was unwittingly planting
them by the act of hiding them. The automatic
character of much animal behavior, the extent to
which their lives flow in fixed channels, was well
seen in the behavior of this squirrel. His procedure
in transferring the nuts from his den in the house to
the ground in the orchard, a distance of probably
one hundred feet, was as definite and regular as the
movement of a piece of machinery.' He would rush
up and over the roof of the house with a nut in his
mouth, by those sharp, spasmodic sallies so charac-
teristic of the movements of the red squirrel, down
the corner of the house to the ground by the same
jerky movements, across some rubbish and open
ground in the same manner, alert and cautious, up
the comer of a small building ten feet high and
eight long, over its roof, with arched tail and spread
feet, snickering and jerking, down to the ground on
the other side, dashing to the trunk of an apple-tree
ten feet away, up it a few feet to make an observa-
45



THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS

tion, then down to the ground again, and out into
the grass, where he would carefully hide his nut»
and cover it with leaves. Then back to the house
again he would go by precisely the same route and
with precisely the same movements, and bring an-
other nut. Day after day I saw him thus engaged
till apparently all the nuts were removed. He prob-
ably did not know he was planting butternut-trees
for other red squirrels, but that was what he was
doing. The crows and jays carry away and plant
acorns and chestnuts in the same way, thus often
causing a pine forest to be succeeded by these trees.
