A TALE OF A SQUIRREL AND THREE BLIND MICE.
"Andy, what is a shade-tail?"
We were encamped in an oak-forest on the eastern bank of
the Rappahannock, late in the fall of 1863. We had built no
winter-quarters yet, although the nights were growing rather
frosty, and had to content ourselves with our little "dog-tents,"
as we called our shelters, some dozen or so of which now
constituted our company row. I had just come in from a trip through
the woods in quest of water at a spring near an old deserted
log-house about a half-mile to the south of our camp, when,
throwing down my heavy canteens, I made the above interrogatory of
my chum.
Andy was lazily lying at full length on his back in the tent,
reclining on a soft bed of pine-branches, or "Virginia feathers,"
as we called them, with his hands clasped behind his head, lustily
singing--
"Tramp, tramp, tramp! the boys are marching!
Cheer up, comrades, they will come!
And beneath the starry flag
We shall breathe the air again--"
"What's that?" asked he, ceasing his song before finishing the
stanza, and rising up on his elbow.
"I asked whether you could tell me what a shade-tail is?"
"A shade-tail! Never heard of it before. Don't believe there is any
such thing. I know what a buck-tail is, though. There's one," said
he, pulling a fine specimen out from under his knapsack. "That just
came in the mail while you were gone. The old buck that chased the
flies with that brush for many a year was shot up among the Buffalo
mountains last winter, and my father bought his tail of the man who
killed him, and has sent it to me. It cost him just one dollar."
Buck-tails were in great demand with us in those days, and happy
indeed was the man who could secure so fine a specimen as Andy now
proudly held in his hand.
"But isn't it rather large?" inquired I. "And it's nearly all
white, and would make an excellent mark for some Johnny to shoot
at, eh?"
"Never you fear for that. 'Old Trusty' up there," said he,
pointing to his gun hanging along underneath the ridge-pole of the
tent,--"'Old Trusty' and I will take care of Johnny Reb."
"But, Andy," continued I, "you haven't answered my question yet.
What is a shade-tail?"
"A shade-tail," said he, meditatively,--"how should I know? I
know precious well what a _detail_ is, though; and I'm on one for
to-morrow. We go across the river to throw up breastworks."
"I forgot," said I, "that you have not studied Greek to any extent
yet. If you live to get home and go back to school again at the old
Academy, and begin to dig Greek roots in earnest, you will find
that a shade-tail is a--squirrel. For that is what the old Greeks
called the bonny bush-tail. Because, don't you see, when a squirrel
sits up on a tree with his tail turned up over his back, he makes a
shade for himself with his tail, and sits, as it were, under the
shadow of his own vine and fig-tree."
"Well," said Andy, "and what if he does? What's to hinder him?"
"Nothing," answered I, entering the tent and lying down beside him
on the pile of Virginia feathers; "only I saw one out here in the
woods as I came along, and I think I know where his nest is; and
if you and I can catch him, or, what would be better still, if we
can capture one of his young ones (if he has any), why we might
tame him and keep him for a pet. I've often thought it would be a
fine thing for us to have a pet of some kind or other. Over in the
Second Division, there is one regiment that has a pet crow, and
another has a kitten. They go with the men on all their marches,
and they say that the kitten has actually been wounded in battle,
and no doubt will be taken or sent up North some day and be a great
curiosity. Now why couldn't we catch and tame a shade-tail?"
"Yes," said Andy, becoming a little interested; "he could be taught
to perch on Pointer's buck-horns in camp, and could ride on your
drum on the march."
Pointer, you must know, was the tallest man in the company,
and therefore stood at the head of the line when the company
was formed. When we enlisted, he brought with him a pair of
deer-antlers as an appropriate symbol for a Buck-tail company,--no
doubt with the intention of making both ends meet. Now the idea of
having a live tame squirrel to perch on Pointer's buck-horns was a
capital one indeed.
But as the first thing to be done in cooking a hare is to catch the
hare, so we concluded that the first thing to be done in taming
a squirrel was to catch the squirrel. This gave us a world of
thought. It would not do to shoot him. We could not trap him. After
discussing the merits of smoking him out of his hole, we determined
at last to risk cutting down the tree in which he had his home, and
trying to catch him in a bag.
That afternoon, when we thought he would likely be at home taking a
nap, having provided ourselves with an axe, an old oat-bag, and a
lot of tent rope, we cautiously proceeded to the old beech-tree on
the outskirts of the camp, where our intended pet had his home.
"Now, you see, Andy," said I, pointing up to a crotch in the tree,
"up there is his front door; there he goes out and comes in. My
plan is this: one of us must climb the tree and tie the mouth of
the bag over that hole somehow, and come down. Then we will cut the
tree down, and when it falls, if old shade-tail is at home, like as
not he'll run into the bag; and then, if we can be quick enough, we
can tie a string around the bag, and there he is!"
Andy climbed the tree and tied the bag. After he had descended, we
set vigorously to work at cutting down the beech. It took us about
half an hour to make any serious inroad upon the tough trunk. But
by and by we had the satisfaction of seeing the tree apparently
shiver under our blows, and at last down it came with a crash.
We both ran toward the bag as fast as we could, ready to secure
our prize; but we found, alas! that squirrels sometimes have two
doors to their houses, and that while we had hoped to bag our
bush-tail at the front door, he had merrily skipped out the back
way. For scarcely had the tree reached the ground, when we both
beheld our intended pet leaping out of the branches and running up
a neighboring tree as fast as his legs could carry him.
"Plague take it!" said Andy, wiping the perspiration from his face,
"what shall we do now? I guess you'd better run to camp and get a
little salt to throw on his tail."
"Never mind," said I, "we'll get him yet, see if we don't. I see
him up there behind that old dry limb peeping out at us--there he
goes!"
Sure enough, there he did go, from tree-top to tree-top,
"lickerty-skoot," as Andy afterward expressed it, and we after him,
quite losing our heads, and shouting like Indians.
As ill luck would have it, our shade-tail was making straight for
the camp, on the outskirts of which he was discovered by one of the
men, who instantly gave the alarm--"A squirrel! a squirrel!" In a
moment all the boys in camp not on duty came running pell-mell,
Sergeant Kensill's black-and-tan terrier, Little Jim (of whom more
anon), leading the way. I suppose there must have been about a
hundred men together, and all yelling and shouting too, so that
the poor squirrel checked his headlong course high up on the dead
limb of a great old oak-tree. Then, forming a circle around the
tree, with "Little Jim" in the midst, the boys began to shout and
yell as when on the charge,--
"Yi-yi-yi! Yi-yi-yi!"
Whereat the poor squirrel was so terrified, that, leaping straight
up and out from his perch into open space, in sheer affright and
despair, down he came tumbling tail over head into the midst of the
circle, which rapidly closed about him as he neared the ground.
With yells and cheers that made the wood ring, a hundred hands were
stretched out as if to catch him as he came down. But Little Jim
beat them all. True to his terrier blood and training, he suddenly
leaped up like a shot, seized the squirrel by the nape of the neck,
gave him a few angry shakes, which ended his agony, and carried him
off triumphantly in his mouth to the tent of his owner, Sergeant
Kensill, of Company F.
That evening, as we sat in our tent eating our fried hard-tack,
Andy remarked, while sipping his coffee from his black tin cup,
that if buck-tails were as hard to catch as shade-tails, they were
well worth a dollar apiece any day; and that he believed a crow, or
one of those young pigs we found running wild in the woods when we
came to that camp, or something of that sort, would make a better
pet than a squirrel.
"Well," said I, "we caught those pigs, anyhow, didn't we? But
didn't they squeal! Fortunately they were so much like oysters that
they couldn't get away from us, and all found their way into our
frying-pans at last."
"I fail to apprehend your meaning," said Andy, with mock gravity,
setting down his black tin cup on the gum-blanket. "By what right
or authority, sir, do you presume to tell me that a pig is like an
oyster?"
"Why, don't you see? A pig is like an oyster _because he can't
climb a tree_! And that's the reason why we caught him."
"Bah!" exclaimed Andy; "that's a miserable joke, that is."
"Yet you must admit that it is a most happy circumstance that a pig
cannot climb a tree, or we should have missed more than one good
meal of fresh pork. Yet although we failed to make a pet of the
squirrel because he _could_ climb a tree, and of the pig because he
_could not_, we shall make a pet of something or other yet. Of that
I am certain."
It was some months later, and not until we were safely established
in winter-quarters, that we finally succeeded in our purpose of
having something to pet. I was over at Brigade headquarters one
day, visiting a friend who had charge of several supply-wagons.
Being present while he was engaged in overhauling his stores, I
found in the bottom of a large box, in which blankets had been
packed away, a whole family of mice. The father of the family
promptly made his escape; the mother was killed in the capture, and
one little fellow was so injured that he soon died; but the rest,
three in number, I took out unhurt. As I laid them in the palm of
my hand, they at once struck me as perfect little beauties. They
were very young and quite small, being no larger than the end of my
finger, with scarcely any fur on them, and their eyes quite shut.
Putting them into my pocket and covering them with some cotton
which my friend gave me, I started home with my prize. Stopping
at the surgeon's quarters on reaching camp, I begged a large
empty bottle (which I afterward found had been lately filled with
pulverized gum arabic), and somewhere secured an old tin can of
the same diameter as the bottle. Then I got a strong twine, went
down to my tent, and asked Andy to help me make a cage for my pets,
which with pride I took out of my pocket and set to crawling and
nosing about on the warm blankets on the bunk.
"What are you going to do with that bottle?" inquired Andy.
"Going to cut it in two with this string," said I, holding up my
piece of twine.
"Can't be done!" asserted he.
"Wait and see," answered I.
Procuring a mess-pan full of cold water, and placing it on the
floor of the tent near the bunk on which we were sitting, I wound
the twine once around the bottle a few inches from the bottom, in
such a way that Andy could hold one end of the bottle and pull one
end of the twine one way, while I held the other end of the bottle
and pulled the other end of the twine the other way, thus causing
the twine, by means of its rapid friction, to heat the bottle in a
narrow, straight line all around. After sawing away in this style
for several minutes, I suddenly plunged the bottle into the pan of
cold water, when it at once snapped in two along the line where the
twine had passed around it, and as clean and clear as if it had
been cut by a diamond. Then, melting off the top of the old tin
can by holding it in the fire, I fastened the body of the can on
the lower end of the bottle. When finished, the whole arrangement
looked like a large long bottle, the upper part of which was glass
and the lower tin. In this way I accomplished the double purpose
of providing my pets with a dark chamber and a well-lighted
apartment, at the same time preventing them from running away.
Placing some cotton on the inside of both can and bottle for a bed,
and thrusting a small sponge moistened with sweetened water into
the neck of the bottle, I then put my pets into their new home.
Of course they could not see, for their eyes were not yet open;
neither did they at first seem to know how to eat; but as necessity
is the mother of invention with mice as well as with men, they
soon learned to toddle forward to the neck of the bottle and suck
their sweet sponge. In a short time they learned also to nibble at
a bit of apple, and by and by could crunch their hard-tack like
veritable veterans.
The bottle, as has already been said, had been filled with
pulverized gum arabic. Some of this still adhering to the inside
of the bottle, was gradually brushed off by their growing fur; and
it was amusing to see the little things sit on their haunches and
clean themselves of the sticky substance. Sometimes they would
all three be busy at the same time, each at himself; and again
two of them would take to licking the third, rubbing their little
red noses all over him from head to tail in the most amusing way
imaginable.
Gradually they grew very lively, and became quite tame, so that we
could take them out of their house into our hands, and let them
hunt about in our pockets for apple-seeds or pieces of hard-tack.
We called them Jack, Jill, and Jenny, and they seemed to know their
names. When let out of their cage occasionally for a romp on the
blankets, they would climb over everything, running along the inner
edge of the eave-boards and the ridge-pole, but never succeeded
in getting away from us. It was a comical sight to see Little Jim
come in to look at them. A mouse was almost the highest possible
excitement to Jim; for a mouse was second cousin to a rat, no
doubt, as Jim looked at matters; and just say "rats!" to Jim, if
you wanted to see him jump! He would come in and look at our pets,
turn his head from one side to the other, and wrinkle his brow,
and whine and bark; but we were determined he should not kill our
mousies as he had killed our shade-tail a few months before.
What to do with our pets when spring came on and winter-quarters
were nearly at an end, we knew not. We could not take them along on
the march, neither did we like to leave them behind; for it seemed
cruel to leave Jack, Jill, and Jenny in the deserted and dismantled
camp to go back to the barbarous habits of their ancestors. On
consideration, therefore, we concluded to take them back to the
wagon train and leave them with the wagoner, who, though at first
he demurred to our proposal, at last consented to let us turn them
loose among his oat-bags, where I doubt not they had a merry time
indeed.