42 BIRDS. 
the struggle that the farmer cautiously put his hands 
down and grabbed them both by the back of the neck. 
He put them in a cage, and offered them bread and 
other food. This they refused to eat, but in a few 
days one of them had eaten the other up, picking his 
bones clean and leaving nothing but the skeleton. 
The same farmer was one day in his cellar when 
two rats came out of a hole near him in great haste, 
and ran up the cellar wall and along its top till they 
came to a floor timber that stopped their progress, 
when they turned at bay, and looked excitedly back 
along the course they had come. In a moment a wea- 
sel, evidently in hot pursuit of them, came out of the 
hole, and seeing the farmer, checked his course and 
darted back. The rats had doubtless turned to give 
him fight, and would probably have been a match for 
him. 
The weasel seems to track its game by scent. A 
hunter of my acquaintance was one day sitting in the 
woods, when he saw a red squirrel run with great 
speed up a tree near him, and out upon a long branch, 
from which he leaped to some rocks, and disappeared 
beneath them. In a moment a weasel came in full 
course upon his trail, ran up the tree, then out along 
the branch, from the end of which he leaped to the 
rocks as the squirrel did, and plunged beneath them. | 
Doubtless the squirrel fell a prey to him. The 
squirrel’s best game would have been to have kept to 
the higher tree-tops, where he could easily have dis- 
tanced the weasel. But beneath the rocks he stood a 
very poor chance. I have often wondered what keeps 
such an animal as the weasel in check, for they are 
quite rare. They never need go hungry, for rats and 
squirrels and mice and birds are everywhere. They 
