76 ANIMAL LIFE OF CARLSBAD CAVERN 



back to the brink of the shaft that dropped one hundred 

 feet into utter darkness. Every little nook and corner 

 of the walls about the main entrance showed their tracks 

 and trails, and many of the niches were filled with their 

 trash piles or " houses" of sticks and bits of stones, 

 bones, cow-chips, and food refuse. Some of the cabins 

 and storehouses at the cave were occupied by them, 

 and a soft nest of chewed up and finely shredded gunny 

 sack was found in a section of stovepipe in a corner of 

 my cabin. One of the wood rats was caught in a 

 storehouse at the entrance to the ladder shaft leading 

 down into the cave, where they came for grain and 

 supplies and made nests in the stacks of guano sacks. 

 They had at times been quite numerous in this building, 

 as shown by accumulated pellets, but a little spotted 

 skunk also had access to the storeroom and kept them 

 away most of the time. 



Their bones were the commonest of any rodent in the 

 owl pellets in the caves and under the owls ' nests along 

 the cliffs, and were also found in droppings of ring- 

 tails, coyotes, and bobcats. They have many enemies, 

 which probably accounts for their occupation of the 

 rocky fortresses of cliff and canyon wall, and for the 

 care with which they close their rocky doorways with 

 sticks and stones and thorny vegetation. They are so 

 highly edible as to be especially sought by birds of prey 

 and carnivorous beasts, and presumably wxre eaten by 

 primitive man. In their rocky strongholds, however, 

 they are less easily obtained by man and by many other 

 of their enemies than are the gray wood rats that de- 

 pend on stick houses in the open valley. 



