The sun went down in a spindrift of pale gold and gray, which faded
into a bank of lead-colored cloud. The next morning the woods and
fields were dumb with snow. No blue jays squalled, nor white-skirted
juncos clicked; neither were there any nuthatches running gruntingly
up and down the tree-trunks. There was not even the caw of a passing
crow from the cold sky. As I followed an unbroken wood-road, it seemed
as if all the wild-folk were gone.
The snow told another story. On its smooth surface were records of the
lives that had throbbed and passed and ebbed beneath the silent trees.
Just ahead of me the road crossed a circle where, a half-century ago,
the charcoal-burners had set the round stamp of one of their pits. On
the level snow there was a curious trail of zigzag tracks. They were
deep and close-set, and made by some animal that walked flat-footed. I
recognized the trail of the unhasting skunk. Other animals may jump
and run and skurry through life, but the motto of the skunk is, "Don't
hurry, others will." The tracks of the fore-paw, when examined
closely, showed long claw-marks which were absent from the print of
the hind feet. Occasionally the trail changed into a series of groups
of four tracks arranged in a diagonal straight line, which marked
where the skunk had broken into the clumsy gallop which is its fastest
gait. Most of the time this particular skunk had walked in a slow and
dignified manner. By the edge of the woods he had stopped and dug
deeply into a rotten log, evidently looking for winter-bound crickets
and grubs.
At this point another character was added to the plot of this snow
story. Approaching at right angles to the trail of the skunk were the
tracks of a red fox. I knew he was red, because that is the only kind
of fox found in that part of New England. I knew them to be the tracks
of a fox, because they ran straight instead of spraddling like a dog,
and never showed any mark of a dragging foot. The trail told what had
happened. The first tracks were the far-apart ones of a hunting fox.
When he reached the skunk's trail, the foot-prints became close
together and ran parallel to the trail and some distance away from it.
The fox was evidently following the tracks in a thoughtful mood. He
was a young fox, or he would not have followed them at all. At the
edge of the clearing he had sighted the skunk and stopped, for the
prints were melted deep into the snow. Sometimes an old and hungry fox
will kill a skunk. In order to do this safely, the spine of the skunk
must be broken instantly by a single pounce, thus paralyzing the
muscles on which the skunk depends for his defense; for the skunk
invented the gas-attack a million years before the Boche. No living
animal can stay within range of the choking fumes of the liquid musk
which the skunk can throw for a distance of several feet. The snow
told me what happened next. It was a sad story. The fox had sprung and
landed beside the skunk, intending to snap it up like a rabbit. The
skunk snapped first. Around the log was a tangle of fox-tracks, with
flurries and ridges and holes in the snow where the fox had rolled and
burrowed. Out of the farther side a series of tremendous bounds showed
where a wiser and a smellier fox had departed from that skunk with an
initial velocity of close to one mile per minute. Finally, out of the
confused circle came the neat, methodical trail of the unruffled skunk
as he moved sedately away. Probably to the end of his life the device
of a black-and-white tail rampant will always be associated in that
fox's mind with the useful maxim, "Mind your own business."
Beyond the instructive fable of the fox and the skunk showed lace-work
patterns and traceries in the snow where scores and hundreds of the
mice-folk had come up from their tunnels beneath the whiteness, and
had frolicked and feasted the long night through. Some of these tracks
were in little clumps of fours. Each group had a five-fingered pair of
large prints in front and a pair of four-fingered tracks just behind.
Down the middle ran a tail-mark. They were the tracks of the
white-footed or deer-mice. These were the same little robbers which
swarmed into my winter camp and gnawed everything in sight. Even a
flitch of bacon hung on a cord was riddled with their tiny
teeth-marks. Only things hung on wires were safe, for their clinging
little feet cannot find a footing on the naked iron. One night they
gnawed a ring of round holes through the crown of a cherished felt hat
belonging to a friend of mine. The language he used when he looked at
that hat the next morning was unfit for the ears of any young
deer-mouse. Another time the deer-mice carried off about a peck of
expensive stuffing from a white horse-hair mattress, which I had
imported for the personal repose of my aged frame. Although I
ransacked that cabin from turret to foundation-stone I could never
find a trace of that horse-hair. In spite of their evil ways one
cannot help liking the little rascals. They have such bright, black
eyes, and wear such snowy, silky waistcoats and stockings.
The other evening I sat reading alone in my cabin in the heart of the
pine-barrens before a roaring fire. Suddenly I felt something tickle
my knee. When I moved there was a sudden jump and a deer-mouse sprang
out from my trouser-leg to the floor. Then I put a piece of bread on
the edge of the wood-box. Although I saw the bread disappear, I could
catch no glimpse of what took it. Finally I put a piece on my shoe,
and after running back and forth from the wood-box several times, Mr.
Mouse at last became brave enough to take it. When he found that I did
not move, he sat up on my shoe like a little squirrel and nibbled away
at his crumb, watching me all the time out of a corner of his black
eyes. I forgave him my friend's hat, and was almost ready to overlook
the horse-hair episode. When I moved, like a flash he dashed up the
wall by the fireplace, and hid behind a row of books that stood on
the red-oak plank which I had put in as a mantel-piece. Unfortunately
he had forgotten to hide his long silky tail. It hung down through the
crack between the plank and the rough stone of the chimney. I tiptoed
over and gave it a pinch to remind him to meddle no more with other
people's mattresses.
Returning to the wood-road--on that morning, among the trails of the
deer-mice were the more numerous tracks of the meadow- or field-mouse.
They show no tail-mark, and the smaller footprints were not side by
side as with the deer-mice, but almost always one behind the other.
These smaller paw-marks among all jumping-animals, such as rabbits,
squirrels, and mice, are always the marks of the fore-paws. The larger
far-apart tracks mark where the hind feet of the jumper come down in
front and outside of the fore-paws as he jumps.
On that day, among the mouse-tracks on the snow there showed another
faint trail, which looked like a string of tiny exclamation marks with
a tail-mark between them. It was the track of the masked shrew, the
smallest mammal of the Eastern states. This tiny fierce fragment of
flesh and blood is only about the length of a man's little finger. So
swift are the functions of its wee body that, deprived of food for six
hours, the shrew starves and dies. Many of them are found starved to
death on the melting snow, having crept up from their underground
burrows through the shafts made by grass and weed-stems. Wandering
over the white waste, they lose their way and, failing to find food,
starve before the sun is half way down the sky. As the shrew does not
hibernate, his whole life is a swift hunt for food; for every day this
apparently eyeless, earless animal must eat its own weight in flesh.
The weasels kill from blood-lust, but the shrews kill for their very
life's sake. It is a fearsome sight to see a shrew attack a mouse. The
mouse bites. The shrew eats. Boring in, the shrew secures a grip with
its long, crooked, crocodile jaws filled with fierce teeth, and
devours its way like fire through skin and flesh and bone, worrying
out and swallowing mouthfuls of blood and flesh until the mouse falls
over dead. This tiny beastling, the masked shrew, must be weighed by
troy weight, and tips a jeweler's scale at less than forty-five
grains.
To-day the snow said the shrew had been an unbidden and unwelcome
guest at the mice-dinner. At first the mice-trails were massed
together in a maze of tracks. Where the trail of the shrew touched the
circle, there shot out separate lines of mice-tracks, like the spokes
of a wheel, with the paw-marks far apart, showing that the guests had
all sprung up from the laden table of the snow and dashed off in
different directions. The shrew-track circled faintly here and there,
ran for some distance in a long straight trail, and--stopped. The
Sword of Damocles, which hangs forever over the head of all the little
wild-folk, had fallen. The shrew was gone. A tiny fleck of blood and a
single track like a great X on the snow told the tale of his passing.
All his fierceness and courage availed nothing when the great talons
of the flying death clamped through his soft fur. X is the signature
of the owl-folk just as K is of the hawk-kind. The size of the mark in
this case showed that the killer was one of the larger owls. Later in
the winter it might have been the grim white Arctic owl, which
sometimes comes down from the frozen North in very cold weather. So
early in the season, however, it would be either the barred or the
great horned owl.
I had hunted and camped and fished and tramped all through this
hill-country, and although I had often heard at night the "Whoo,
hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo" of the great horned owl, which keeps always the
same pitch, I had never heard the call of the barred owl, which ends
in a falling cadence with a peculiar deep, hollow note. So I decided
that the maker of the track was that fierce king of the deep woods,
whose head, with its ear-tufts or horns, may be seen peering from his
nest of sticks on the mountainside in a high tree-top as early as
February. On wings so muffled by soft downy feathers as to be
absolutely noiseless, he had swooped down in the darkness, and the
tiny bubble of the shrew's life had broken into the void.
Beyond this point the road wound upward toward the slope of the
Cobble, a steep, sharp-pointed little hill which suddenly thrust
itself up from a circle of broad meadows and flat woodlands. Time was
when all the Cobble was owned and ploughed clear to its peak by
Great-great-uncle Samuel, who had a hasty disposition and a tremendous
voice, and ploughed with two yoke of oxen which required a
considerable amount of conversation. Tradition has it that, when
discoursing to them, he could be heard in four different towns. That
was more than one hundred years ago, and the Cobble has been untouched
by plough or harrow since, and to-day is wooded to the very top.
[Illustration: DEATH-IN-THE-DARK--THE GREAT HORNED OWL]
Just ahead of me on the wood-road showed a deep track which only in
recent years has been seen in Connecticut. In my boyhood a deer-track
was as unknown as that of a wolf, and the wolves have been gone for at
least a century. Within the last ten years the deer have come back.
Last summer I met two on the roads with the cows, and later saw seven
make an unappreciated visit to my neighbor's garden, where they seemed
to approve highly of her lettuce. Straight up the hillside ran the
line of deeply stamped little hoof-marks. The trail looks like a
sheep's; but the front of each track ends in two beautifully curved
sharp points, while the track of a sheep is straighter and blunter.
Nor could any sheep negotiate that magnificent bound over the
five-foot rail fence. From take-off to where the four small hoofs
landed together on the other side was a good twenty feet.
On the other side of the fence the snow had drifted over a patch of
sweet fern by the edge of the wood-road in a low hummock. As I plodded
along, I happened to strike this with my foot. There was a tremendous
whirring noise, the snow exploded all over me, and out burst a
magnificent cock partridge, as we call the ruffed grouse in New
England, and whizzed away among the laurels like a lyddite shell.
When the snowstorm began, he had selected a cozy spot in the lee of
the sweet-fern patch, and had let himself be snowed over. The warmth
of his body had made a round, warm room, and with plenty of rich
fern-seeds within easy reach, he was prepared to stay in winter
quarters a week, if necessary.
The stories of the snow, although often difficult to read, are always
interesting. After the winter fairly sets in, we read nothing about
the Seven Sleepers who have put themselves in cold storage until
spring. The bear, the raccoon, the woodchuck, the skunk, the chipmunk,
and the jumping-mouse are all fast asleep underground. The last
sleeper never touches the ground when awake, and sleeps swinging
up-side-down by the long, recurved nails on his hind feet. He is the
bat, who lives and hunts in the air, and can out-fly any bird of his
own size.
Perhaps the most unexpected of the snow stories was one which I read
one winter day when out for a walk with the Botanist. Although the
snow was on the ground, the sky was as blue as in June, as the
Botanist and I swung into an old road that the forgotten feet of more
than two centuries had worn deep below its banks. It was opened in
1691, when William and Mary were king and queen, and Boston Tea
Parties and Liberty Bells and Declarations of Independence were not
yet even dreamed of in the land.
We always keep a bird-record of every walk, and note down the names of
the sky-folk whom we meet and any interesting bit of news that they
may have for us. In the migration season there is great rivalry as to
who shall meet the greatest number from the crowd of travelers going
north. Last year my best day's record was eighty-four different kinds
of birds, which beat the Botanist by two. A black duck and a late
bay-breasted warbler were the cause of his undoing. To a birdist every
walk is full of possibilities. Any day, anywhere, some bird may flash
into sight for the first time.
The Botanist has pointed out to me not fewer than twenty times the
sacred field where, one bitter winter day, he saw his first (and last)
flock of horned larks. For my part, I never fail to show him the
pignut hickory where my first golden-winged warbler spoke to me one
May morning.
To-day, however, our walk was almost a birdless one. We heard the caw
of the crow, the only bird-note that can be certainly counted on for
every day of the year. We saw the flutter of the white skirts of the
juncos. From a blighted chestnut tree we saw a bird flash down into
the dry grass from his perch on a dead limb. As we came nearer, he
glided off like a little aeroplane, and we recognized the flight and
the spotted buff waistcoat of the sparrow-hawk hunting meadow-mice.
Later in the morning we heard the "Pip, pip," of the song sparrow, and
marked the black spot on his breast. Far ahead, across a snow-covered
meadow, a bird flew dippingly up and down. He had laid aside his
canary-yellow and black suit, but his flight bewrayed the goldfinch.
Passing through a beechwood, we heard a sharp call, and saw a
black-and-white bird back down a tree. This cautious procedure stamped
him as the downy woodpecker. Of all the tree-climbers only the
woodpeckers back down.
Strangely enough, a short distance farther on we heard another cry
like that of the downy woodpecker, only harsher and wilder, and caught
a glimpse of the hairy woodpecker, the big brother of the downy, a
rarer, larger bird of the deep woods. That ended our bird list--a
paltry seven when we should have had a score.
We passed the swamp meadow close to the road, where the blue, blind
gentian grows not twenty-five yards from the unseeing eyes of the
travelers, who pass there every October day and never suspect what a
miracle of color lies hidden in the tangle of marsh-grass beside their
path. The Botanist with many misgivings had shown me the secret. For
three years we had tramped together before he held me to be worthy to
share it.
Farther on we crossed a plateau where a series of stumps showed where
a grove of chestnut trees had grown in the days before the Blight.
Suddenly from under our very feet dashed a brown rabbit, his white
powder-puff gleaming at every jump. The lithe, lean, springing body
seemed the very embodiment of speed. There are few animals that can
pass a rabbit in a hundred yards, even our cottontail, the slowest of
his family. He is, however, only a sprinter. In a long-distance event
the fox, the dog, and even the dogged, devilish little weasel can run
him down.
We looked at the form where he had been lying. It was a wet little
hollow made in the dank grass, with only a few dripping leaves for a
mattress--a forlorn bed. Yet Runny-Bunny, as some children I know have
named him, seems to rest well in his open-air sleeping porch, and even
lies abed there.
One far-away snowy day in February two of us stole a few moments from
the bedside of a sick child--how long, long ago it all seems now!--and
walked out among the wild-folk to forget. In a bleak meadow, right at
our feet, we saw a rabbit crouched, nearly covered by the snow. He had
been snowed under days before, but had slept out the storm until half
of his fleecy coverlet had melted away.
He lay so still that at first we thought he was dead; but on looking
closely, we could see the quick throbbing of his frightened little
heart. There was not a quiver from his taut body, or a blink from his
wide-open eyes. He lay motionless until my hand stroked gently his wet
fur. Then, indeed, he exploded like a brown bomb-shell from the snow,
and we laughed and laughed, the first and last time for many a weary
week.
Years later, I was coasting down the meadow-hill with one of my boys;
and, as the sled came to a stop, a rabbit burst out of the snow,
almost between the runners. The astonished boy rolled into a drift as
if blown clear off his sled by the force of the explosion.
To-day, as the Brownie sped over the soft snow, we could see how its
tracks in series of fours were made. At every jump the long hind-legs
thrust themselves far in front. They made the two far-apart tracks in
the snow, while the close-set fore-paws made the nearby tracks.
Accordingly a rabbit is always traveling in the direction of the
far-apart tracks, quite contrary to what most of us would suppose.
It is the same way with celestial rabbits. Look any clear winter night
down below the belt of Orion, and you will see a great rabbit-track in
the sky--the constellation of Lepus, the Hare, whose track leads away
from the Great Dog with baleful Sirius gleaming green in his fell jaw.
From the rabbit-meadow we followed devious paths down through Fern
Valley, which in summertime is a green mass of cinnamon fern,
interrupted fern, Christmas fern, brake, regal fern, and half a score
of others. In the midst of the marsh were rows of the fruit-stems of
the sensitive fern, which is the first to blacken before the frost.
These were heavy with rich wine-brown seed-pods, filled with seeds
like fine dust. They had an oily, nutty taste; and it would seem as if
some hungry mouse or bird would find them good eating during famine
times. Yet so far as I have observed they are never fed upon.
Along the side of the path were thickets of spice-bush, whose crushed
leaves in summer have an incense sweeter than burns in any censer of
man's making. To-day I broke one of the brittle branches, to nibble
the perfumed bark, and found at the end of a twig, pretending to be a
withered leaf, a cocoon of the prometheus moth. The leaf had been
folded together, lined with spun silk, and lashed so strongly that the
twig would break before the silken cable.
We passed through a clump of staghorn sumac with branches like
antlers, bearing at their ends heavy masses of fruit-clusters made up
of hundreds of dark, velvety crimson berries, each containing a brown
seed. The pulp of these berries is intensely sour, its flavor giving
the sumac its other name of "vinegar plant." These red clusters
crushed in sweetened water make a very good imitation of the red
circus-lemonade of our childhood. The staghorn is not to be confounded
with its treacherous sister, the poison sumac, with her corpse-colored
berries. She is a vitriol-thrower, and with her death-pale bark and
arsenic-green leaves, always makes me think of one of those haggard,
horrible women of the Terror.
It was in Fern Valley that the Botanist made his discovery for the
day. It was only a tree, and moreover a tree that he must have passed
many times before. Only to-day, however, did it catch his eye. The
bark was that of an oak, but the leaves, which clung thick and brown
to the limb, were long, with a straight edge something like the leaves
of the willow-oak, only broader and larger. It was no other than the
laurel-oak, a tree which by all rights belonged hundreds of miles to
the south of us.
He walked gloatingly around his discovery, and it was some time before
I could drag him on. Thereafter he gave me a masterly discourse, some
forty minutes in duration, on the life-history of the oaks, and
propounded several ingenious theories to account for the presence of
this strange species. This discourse continued until we reached the
historic white oak near the end of the valley, where the Botanist once
found a flock of bay-breasted warblers in the middle of a rainstorm;
and again I heard the story of that day.
Through the valley flowed a little stream, and the snow along its
banks told of the goings and comings of the wild-folk. Gray squirrels,
red squirrels, muskrats, rabbits, mice, foxes, weasels, all had passed
and repassed along these banks.
To me the most interesting trail was that of a blarina shrew. His
track in the snow is a strange one. It is a round, tunnel-like trail,
like that of some large caterpillar, with the trough made by the
wallowing little body filled with tiny alternate tracks--one of the
strangest of all the winter trails.
I could obtain very little enthusiasm from the Botanist over blarinas.
He still babbled of laurel-leafed oaks and similar frivolities. Even
the crowning event of the walk left him cold. It came on the
home-stretch. We were passing through the last pasture before reaching
the humdrum turnpike which led to the tame-folk. Suddenly in the snow
I saw a strange trail. It was evidently made by a jumper, but not one
whose track I knew. I followed it, until among the leaves in a bank
something moved. Before my astonished eyes hopped falteringly, but
bravely, a speckled toad.
The winter sun shone palely on his brown back still crusted with
the earth of his chill home. Down under the leaves and the frozen
ground he had heard the call, and struggled to the surface, expecting
to find spring awaiting him. Two jumps, however, had landed him in a
snowbank. It was a disillusion, and Mr. Toad winked his mild brown
eyes piteously. He struggled bravely to get out, but every jump
plunged him deeper into the snow. His movements became feebler as the
little warmth his cold blood contained oozed out.
[Illustration: FLYER, THE SQUIRREL]
Just as he was settling despairingly back into the crystallized cold,
I rescued him. He was too far gone even to move, for cold spells quick
death to the reptile folk. Only his blinking beautiful eyes, like
lignite flecked with gold, and the slow throbbing of his mottled
breast, showed that life was still in him. He nestled close in my
hand, willing to occupy it until warm weather.
I back-tracked him from his faltering efforts, and where his first
lusty jump showed on the thawing ground I found his hibernaculum. It
was only a little hollow, scarcely three inches deep, under sodden
leaves and wet earth, and cheerless enough, according to mammalian
ideas. It was evidently home for Mr. Toad, and when I set him therein,
he scrambled relievedly under some of the loose wet leaves which had
fallen back into his nest. I piled a generous measure of dripping
leaves and moist earth over his warted back. It may have been
imagination, but I fancied that the last look I had from his bright
eyes was one of gratitude. The Botanist scoffed at the idea, for
toads, like pine-snakes, convey absolutely no appeal to his narrow,
flower-bound nature.
I have erected a monument in the shape of a chestnut stake beside Mr.
Toad's winter residence, and I strongly suspect that he will be the
last of his family to get up when the spring rising-bell finally
rings.
"There's positively nothing to this early-rising business," I can hear
him telling his friends at the Puddle Club in April. "Look at what
happened to me. If it hadn't been for a well-meaning giant, I would
have caught my death of cold from getting out of bed too soon. Never
again!"
Our calendar-makers use red letters to mark special days. Personally,
I prefer orchids and birds and sunrises and nests and snakes and
similar markers. I have in my diary "The Day of the Prothonotary
Warbler," "The Day of the Henslow's Sparrow's Nest" (that was a day!),
"The Day of the Fringed Gentian," and many, many others. But always
and forever that snowy 21st of December is marked in my memory as "The
Day of the Early Toad."
Once more I was climbing the Cobble. The wood-road on which I started
had narrowed to a path. Overhead masses of rock showed through the
snow, and above them were the dark depths of the Bear-Hole where
Great-great-uncle Jake had once shot with his flintlock musket the
largest bear ever killed in that part of the state. It was here at the
cliff side that Shahrazad snow told me another story.
Along the edge of the slope ran a track made up of four holes in the
snow. The front ones were far apart and the back ones near apart.
Occasionally, instead of four holes, five would show in the snow, and
the position of the marks was reversed. A little farther on, and the
trail changed. The two near-apart tracks were now in a perpendicular
line instead of side by side. To Chingachgook, or Deerslayer, or
Daniel Boone, or any other well-known tracker, the trail would have,
of course, been an open book. But it had taken an amateur trailer like
myself some years to be able to read that snow record aright. The
trail was that of a cottontail rabbit. At first he had been hopping
contentedly along, with an eye open for anything eatable in the line
of winter vegetables. The far-apart tracks were the paw-marks of the
big hind-legs, which came in front of the marks made by the fore-paws
as they touched the ground at every hop. The five marks were where he
had sat down to look around. The fifth mark was the mark of his stubby
tail, and when he stopped, the little fore-paws made the near-apart
marks in front of the far-apart marks of his hind-feet, instead of
behind them as when he hopped.
Suddenly the rabbit detected something alarming coming from behind,
for the sedate hops changed into startled bounds. A little farther on
the trail said that the rabbit had caught sight of its pursuer as it
ran; for a rabbit by the position of its eyes sees backward and
forward equally well. The tracks showed a frantic burst of speed. In
an effort to get every possible bit of leverage, the fore-legs were
twisted so that they struck the ground one behind the other, which
accounted for the last set of marks perpendicular to those in front. A
line of tracks which came from a pile of stones, and paralleled the
rabbit's trail, told the whole story. The paw-marks were small and
dainty, but beyond each pad-print were the marks of fierce claws. No
wonder the rabbit ran wild when it first scented its enemy, and then
saw its long slim body bounding along behind, white as snow except for
the black tip of its tail.
It was the weasel, whose long body moves like the uncoiling of a steel
spring. A weasel running looks like a gigantic inch-worm that bounds
instead of crawls. Speed, however, is not what the little white killer
depends on for its prey. It can follow a trail by scent better than
any hound, climb trees nearly as well as a squirrel; and if the animal
it is chasing goes into a burrow, it has gone to certain death. The
rabbit's only chance would have been a straight-away run at full speed
for miles and hours. In this way it could probably have tired out the
weasel, which is a killer, not a runner, by profession. A rabbit,
however, like the fox, never runs straight. Round and round in great
circles it runs about its feeding-ground, of which it knows all the
paths and runways and burrows. Against a dog or fox these are safer
tactics than exploring new territory. Against a weasel they are
usually fatal.
It was easy to see on the snow what had happened. At first, when the
rabbit saw the weasel looping along its trail like a hunting snake, it
had started off with a sprint that in a minute carried it out of
sight. Then a strange thing happened. Although a rabbit can run for
an hour at nearly top speed, and in this case had every reason to run,
after a half-mile of rapid circling and doubling, the trail changed
and showed that the rabbit was plodding along as if paralyzed.
One of the weird and unexplained facts in nature is the strange power
that a weasel appears to have over all the smaller animals. Many of
them simply give up and wait for death when they find that a weasel is
on their trail. A red squirrel, which could easily escape through the
tree-tops, sometimes becomes almost hysterical with fright, and has
been known to fall out of a tree-top in a perfect ecstasy of terror.
Even the rat, which is a cynical, practical animal, with no nerves,
and a bitter, brave fighter when fight it must, loses its head when up
against a weasel. A friend of mine once saw a grim, gray old fellow
run squealing aloud across a road from a woodpile and plunge into a
stone wall. A moment later a weasel in its reddish summer coat came
sniffing along the rat's trail and passed within a yard of him.
This night the rabbit, with every chance for escape, began to run
slowly and heavily, as if in a nightmare, watching the while its back
trail. And when the weasel came in sight again, the trail stopped as
the rabbit crouched in the snow waiting for the end. It came
mercifully quick. When the weasel saw the rabbit had stopped, its red
eyes flamed, and with a flashing spring its teeth and claws were at
poor bunny's throat. There was a plaintive whinnying cry, and the
reddened snow told the rest.
So the last story of the snow ended in tragedy, as do nearly all true
stories of the wild-folk. Yet they need not our pity. Better a
thousand times the quick passing at the end of a swift run or of a
brave fight, than the long, long weariness of pain and sickness by
which we humans so often claim our immortality.