marmoto

A big ground squirrel with a sentry habit. The marmot is a mountain rodent about the size of a cat, related to the sciuro and built like a badly made kuniklo. What everyone remembers is the posture: one animal stands bolt upright at the mouth of the burrow while the rest feed, and whistles when anything moves. Alpine walkers hear the whistle long before they see the whistler.

It sleeps through the winter properly. Marmots are true hibernators, not dozers, and spend more than half the year underground. That is why the North American groundhog, a marmot, ended up carrying a whole festival about waking up on the right morning.

Now the near-pair, because it will catch you. Marmoro sits at rank 2629, thirty-five ranks earlier in this same tier, and it means marble. One letter apart: marmoto is a mountain rodent, marmoro is the stone the Romans built with. Neither is derived from the other and the resemblance is pure accident. The way to keep them apart is the t: the marmot has a t in it, and so does the word rodent.