IN FIELD AND WOOD 



houses in the marshes and ponds or in the banks of 

 streams, feeding on lily-roots and mussels which 

 they get under the ice. 



The lean, bloodthirsty minks and weasels are 

 on the hunt all winter. Our native mice are also 

 active. That pretty stitching upon the coverlet of 

 the winter snow in the woods is made by our white- 

 footed mouse and by the little shrew mouse. The 

 former often has large stores of nuts hidden in some 

 cavity in a tree; what supply of food the latter has, 

 if any, I do not know. In the winter the short-tailed 

 meadow or field mice come out of their retreat in 

 the ground and beneath stones and lead gay, fearless 

 lives beneath the snow-drifts. Their little villages, 

 with their runways and abandoned nests, may be 

 seen when the snow disappears in the spring. Their 

 winter life beneath the snow, where no wicked eye 

 or murderous claw can reach them, is in sharp con- 

 trast to their life in summer, when cats and hawks, 

 owls and foxes, pounce upon them day and night. It 

 is only in times of deep snows that they bark our 

 fruit-trees. 



We have in this latitude but one species of hiber- 

 nating mouse the long-tailed jumping mouse, or 

 kangaroo mouse, as it is sometimes called from its 

 mode of locomotion. Late one fall, while making a 

 road near *' Slabsides," we dug one out from its 

 hibernation about two feet below the surface of the 

 ground. It was like a little ball of fur tied with a 

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