70 The Wilderness Hunter. 



plainsmen who knew anything of the curious plains ferret, 

 that rather rare weasel-like animal, which plays the same 

 part on the plains that the mink does by the edges of all 

 our streams and brooks, and the tree-loving sable in the 

 cold northern forests. The ferret makes its home in bur- 

 rows, and by preference goes abroad at dawn and dusk, 

 but sometimes even at mid-day. It is as blood-thirsty as 

 the mink itself, and its life is one long ramble for prey, 

 gophers, prairie-dogs, sage rabbits, jack-rabbits, snakes, 

 and every kind of ground bird furnishing its food. I 

 have known one to fairly depopulate a prairie-dog town, 

 it being the arch foe of these little rodents, because of 

 its insatiable blood lust and its capacity to follow them 

 into their burrows. Once I found the bloody body and 

 broken eggs of a poor prairie-hen which a ferret had evi- 

 dently surprised on her nest. Another time one of my 

 men was eye-witness to a more remarkable instance of the 

 little animal's blood-thirsty ferocity. He was riding the 

 range, and being attracted by a slight commotion in a 

 clump of grass, he turned his horse thither to look, and 

 to his astonishment found an antelope fawn at the last 

 gasp, but still feebly struggling, in the grasp of a ferret, 

 which had throttled it and was sucking its blood with 

 hideous greediness. He avenged the murdered innocent 

 by a dexterous blow with the knotted end of his lariat. 



That mighty bird of rapine, the war eagle, which on 

 the great plains and among the Rockies supplants the 

 bald-headed eagle of better-watered regions, is another 

 dangerous foe of the young antelope. It is even said 

 that under exceptional circumstances eagles will assail a 



