330 Life-histories of Northern Animals 



quarter of a mile away. This woods turned out to be first, a 

 cemetery, second, the happy home of a family of Red-squirrels. 

 Besides a number of holes in trees and in the earth, I 

 found these Squirrels had a snow-drift playground. They had 

 made a perfect labyrinth of galleries in a drift that was twenty 

 feet long and six feet wide. This had ten entrances leading to 

 chambers and passages innumerable, and in very cold days 

 they evidently played tag here instead of in the tree tops. 

 Around the entrances I found the remains of nuts and pine- 

 cones, so maybe somewhere in the snow-drift was a feasting 

 j_ place — their winter palace was banquet hall 



as well as gymnasium; but I could not ex- 

 amine it fully without destroying it, so left 

 it alone (Fig. 115). 



This carousal of the Squirrels lay be- 

 tween the graves of a family that had died of 

 small-pox and of some soldiers killed in the 

 Civil War, but doubtless the Squirrels found 

 it the merriest place on earth. 



Every winter at Cos Cob I find dozens 

 Fig. ii6-opemngofaRed- of tuuncls drivcu uudcr the snow as close as 



squirrel's snow-tunnel. *! i i i T"! C 



possible to the ground. Ihese are 01 two or 

 three inch caUbre and at the bottom show plainly the foot- 

 marks of some animal of Squirrel size, labouring hard to force 

 the passage. Though I never caught the miner in the act, I 

 have at length traced them to the Red-squirrel. The remains 

 of cones, etc., in and around showed what it sought with so 

 much labour. 



ENEMIES The principal enemy of this animal in primitive regions is 



the Pine Marten; indeed, we may consider that next to the 

 Mice the Red-squirrel is the Marten's principal food. Quick 

 though the Squirrel may be, the Marten can follow just as 

 fast. Up the tree and down and from branch to branch, pur- 

 suing to the topmost twigs, turning when it turns, climbing 

 where it climbs, leaping where it leaps, the Marten surely runs 

 it down, and revels in its blood. The Squirrel has but two 



