The book's title character and protagonist is a fat gray squirrel who is wrongly accused of stealing other squirrels' nuts. As a punishment, Timmy Tiptoes is pushed into a small hole in a hollow tree. Timmy Tiptoes finds that the hollow tree is home to a friendly chipmunk named Chippy Hackee. Unfortunately, Timmy Tiptoes is too fat to get out of the small hole in the tree. The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes has been translated into other languages including Dutch, French, German and Spanish. An edition in the Initial Teaching Alphabet was published in 1965,