60 THE MINDS AND MANNERS 



bullets as they come until he reels and falls far down to the 

 cruel slide-rock. He has a wonderful mind, but its qualities 

 and its usefulness belong in Chapter XIII. 



Warm-Coated Animals Avoid "Fresh Air." On this 

 subject there is a strange divergence of reasoning power be- 

 tween the wild animals of cold countries and the sleeping- 

 porch advocates of today. 



Even the most warm-coated of the fur-bearing animals, 

 such as the bears, foxes, beavers, martens and mink, and also 

 the burrowing rodents, take great pains to den up in winter 

 just as far from the "fresh air" of the cold outdoors as they can 

 attain by deep denning or burrowing. The prairie-dog not 

 only ensconces himself in a cul-de-sac at the end of a hole 

 fourteen feet deep and long, but as winter sets in he also 

 tightly plugs up the mouth of his den with moist earth. When 

 sealed up in his winter den the black bear of the north -draws 

 his supply of fresh air through a hole about one inch in diameter, 

 or less. 



But the human devotees of fresh air reason in the opposite 

 direction. It is now the regular thing for mothers to open 

 wide to the freezing air of out-doors either one or all the windows 

 of the rooms in which their children sleep, giving to each child 

 enough fresh air to supply ten full-grown elephants, or twenty 

 head of horses. And the final word is the "sleeping-porch!" 

 It matters not how deadly damp is the air along with its 33 

 degrees of cold, or the velocity of the wind, the fresh air must 

 be delivered. The example of the fat and heavily furred wild 

 beast is ignored; and I just wonder how many people in the 

 United States, old and young, have been killed, or permanently 

 injured, by fresh air, during the last fifteen years. 



And furthermore. Excepting the hoofed species, it is the 

 universal rule of the wild animals of the cold-winter zones of 

 the earth that the mother shall keep her helpless young close 

 beside her in the home nest and keep them warm partly by the 

 warmth of her own body. The wild fur-clad mother does not 



