This could be a partial match to Space Prison/The Survivors by <PERSON>. You can find at least some covers here
In this story, which takes place over several generations of humans, the protagonists are marooned on a planet called Ragnarok. Ragnarok is a high gravity planet with a very harsh environment, having long very cold winters and very hot summers and a variety of dangerous animals.
It turns out that there are two different telepathic animals called "mockers" and "prowlers". Mockers are:
... six little animals the size of squirrels, each of them a different color. They walked on short hind legs like miniature bears and the dark eyes in the bear-chipmunk faces ...
... 322
The two mockers were pleasant company, riding on their shoulders and chattering any nonsense that came to mind. And sometimes saying things that were not at all nonsense, making <PERSON> wonder if mockers could partly read human minds and dimly understand the meaning of some of the things they said
Mockers can telepathically communicate with each-other and can repeat the sounds that another one has heard and telepathically sent to them.
On the other hand, prowlers are violent cat-like creatures, who terrorize the marooned people at first:
They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each of them three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing like yellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like the wind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard line as though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chattering roll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and <PERSON>'s rifle licked out pale tongues of flame as he added his own fire. The prowlers came on, breaking through, but part of them went down and the others were swerved by the fire so that they struck only the outer edge of the area where the Rejects were grouped.
This goes on until one of the survivors helps rescue a mother prowler and her cubs, eventually leading to the "domestication" of the prowlers and their eventual use in the defeat of the aliens who marooned the humans on Ragnarok.
There seemed no way that men and prowlers could ever meet on common ground. They were alien to one another, separated by the gulf of an origin on worlds two hundred and fifty light-years apart. Their only common heritage was the will of each to battle.
But in the spring of one hundred and sixty-one, for a little while one day, the gulf was bridged. 417