20 The Stoat and its ways. 
is sufficient to paralyse a full-grown hare, to say nothing of 
killing a small bird. The ways of the stoat can be observed 
wherever its stores are unearthed, but nowhere better, perhaps, 
than on the marshes, where migrants and nocturnal-feeding birds 
collect on the grass, or in the shallows, at certain periods of the 
year. In such places, during the day, possibly the ground is as 
barren as the ideal wilderness, not a wing can be discovered ; but 
as ‘soon as the evening shades prevail” the birds assemble, and 
the stoat shakes himself and comes out of his lair ready to meet 
them. In his berth, according to-the time of year, may be found 
the golden or the common plover, snipe, spotted crake, dotterel, 
small waders, and migratory birds. Woodcock I have no record 
of; yet I do not believe that there is any warm-blooded thing, of 
reasonable size, which does not at times form part of the stoat’s 
“bag.” After heavy snowstorms, before the frost has hardened 
the surface of the earth’s white mantle, the stoat may be some- 
times seen burrowing under the snow, as it runs along the soil 
seeking for an entrance into the runs from which the moles are 
busy casting up earths. A moderate frost prevents this curious 
form of hunting being visible. If other animals are perplexed by 
the loss of their usual feeding-ground, stoats are not. They betake 
themselves to the hedgerows and woods, where a cruelly hard exis- 
tence has, for a time, forced animal creation into a narrow space, 
seeking the food and shelter which the open country denies to 
them. ‘There—when other things are starving—stoats simply revel 
ina feast on birds, voles, mice, moles, hares and rabbits,—on every- 
thing which luck throws in their path. ‘The fox himself, with all 
his size, strength and cunning, is a fool to a stoat. 
For such small creatures—the body of a very large stoat is 
not a foot long—they are wonderfully strong, and always make a 
brave attempt to get their victims out of sight, generally into the 
cover of their underground store. Let it be what size or weight 
it will, even an old jack hare, a stoat makes a huge effort to move 
it. On the dead flat it can drag three times its own weight by 
sheer muscular strength, and down a slight incline can manage 
to move over four times its own weight by the leverage of forcing 
itself under its victim over and over again. When a bird or 
mammal is fairly small, the stoat must have had other game close 
