In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red
squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red
squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel
would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave
him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both.
Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at
work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them.
Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it
released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by
stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The
bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many
yards and then had pulled it down.
Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a
weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and
round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and
looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the
squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the
squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would
not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my
neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and
took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then
dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such
terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy
prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form,
that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell
upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a
hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my
foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its
methods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is the
incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.