Now in real life Jake liked to think of himself as cool, and clever too, but no grassland predator cared about Jake’s real life. To each of them, he was just another prairie dog, just part of the food chain, or to put it bluntly—meat to eat.

Under the ground, Jake felt safe. He passed through a long, winding, dirt-packed tunnel with chambers going off to the sides. The chambers all had different purposes. The chamber near the entrance to the burrow was the listening room. There, a prairie dog could wait and hear who was outside. Other chambers were storage rooms to keep food until it was needed. There was a nursery where the babies were looked after, and there was even a room that the prairie dogs used as a bathroom.

“Wow!” thought Jake as he moved through the tunnel, “This place goes on forever.” Jake then heard a huffy little bark of another prairie dog. Again, Jake felt a little afraid. What if the prairie dog thought Jake was an intruder? Jake did not want to have to try and fight off a prairie dog, especially not a prairie dog that had so much more experience at being a prairie dog than he did.

The other prairie dog did not attack Jake. Instead, he stood up, gave Jake something that was between a sniff and a kiss, made a kind of friendly noise, and then went off and down another tunnel and into another part of the prairie dog town.

Jake peered down the tunnel. The light was dim, but as far as Jake could see, there was no end in sight. Jake realized that prairie dogs have a whole secret life that no one on the surface can see. A secret life that keeps them safe from all the animals that would just love to eat them.