The Bushy-Tailed Wood Rat of Brit. Columbia. 227 



other things from the pigstye, and stable etc. which are carefully avoided 

 by all but Esquimaux dogs and Bushy-tailed Wood-rats. Wood-rats 

 object to being caught in the common spring traps, but T don't think it 

 hurts them very much from the way in which they will drag a trap about 

 with a ten pound weight attached to it and by another sign of their 

 apparent insensibility to pain which has come under my notice. 



I camped one stormy night forty miles from the nearest inhabited 

 house, in a trapper's old deserted cabin; of course there was the inevitable 

 rat to be considered and the first thing he did was to take my soap offthe 

 table and carry it off to his nest. I found it there and next day took it 

 to the stream 100 yards away left it there for safety, but next day 

 sure enough, there it was back again in the nest 



Well, this Bush-rat gave us no rest at all. He was like a devil 

 turned loose all night, and I sat on my blanket in the middle of the floor 

 trying to shoot him by the light of a flickering candle with a Lee- 

 Metford rifle. A friend was trying to sleep in a bunk in the hut. 

 At last I got a shot and made sure that I had hit him, bnt I could not 

 find his body, as he seemed to fall down a hole. Fifteen 

 minutes later my friend cried out that he had him between his 

 knees. As you may very well believe, I lost no time in squaring our 

 account and was not surprised to find that my shot had cut offone front 

 leg high up at the shoulder. Yet that rat for five minutes before his 

 capture was racketing round over every thing just as though nothing 

 was the matter with him. 



Every trapper and prospector in the mountains has many and 

 extraordinary stories to tell of the Bushy-tailed rats and I find no 

 difficulty in believing all I am told but perhaps some of the stories 

 would not go down in the east. 



This year I had to leave my house tor a few months and four Bush- 

 rats got into it. The state of that house after a month with them for 

 tenants was indescribable on my return 



There were six four-gallon coal oil cans full of cactus taken out of the 

 dining room; there were remains of hundreds of specimens of my butter- 

 flies which had been left neatly packed away in paper envelopes 

 scattered all over the floor, down in the cellar, up in the attic, in fact 



