We depend on all too occasional visits to understand other modes and rhythms of existence with any depth, although there are times when a chance sight goes deep enough to last. This season of the year the chipmunks are very active, foraging for grains and nuts to store in their hibernation chambers underground. Cats, of which there are far too many loose on the Cape, kill so many chipmunks that it is sometimes hard to see how the population keeps up. (For one thing, these little “ground squirrels” only seem to have one brood a year.) Cats bring them home almost daily, teased into a terrible dance, spinning around like weary boxers on a revolving stage. A chipmunk’s alert curiosity, or habit of freezing into attention, may well be its most vulnerable point. Cats will get them when they are out in the open filling their cheeks with food. They will also come out of the shelter of a hole, or stone wall, to investigate the source of some unusual noise or light tapping, or a whistle, or just stay fixed when a man approaches, in a kind of actively questioning mood. I hear a scattered dashing in the leaves, and there it is--a striped, bright-looking little animal, tail twitching, arrested in motion, quivering and throbbing, its throat pulsing at a furious rate. We watch each other for three or four minutes. I too have my share of curiosity. Gradually its quick pulsing dies down. It turns its head slightly away, with those moist, black, intent little eyes. With a quick flip it is around a tree, then drops down to run along the leaves again and jump behind a boulder. It was in no mortal danger that time, but our two lives were brought together into relationship by another danger--the dark universe of chance. I felt it as almost a kind of love between strangers, in which my mental being was in no way divorced from what might lie behind a chipmunk’s eye.