IN FIELD AND WOOD 



'freshly earth-stained? The squirrel could not have 

 carried them in his cheek pouches, they were so 

 large; how, then, did he carry them? 



The matter stood thus with me for some weeks; 

 I was up against a little problem in natural history 

 that I could not solve. Late in November I visited 

 the scene of the squirrel-holes again, and at last got 

 the key to the mystery : the cunning little delver cuts 

 a groove in one side of the hole just large enough 

 to let the stone through, then packs it full of soil 

 again. When I made my November visit it had been 

 snowing and raining and freezing and thawing, and 

 the top of the ground was getting soft. A red squir- 

 rel had visited the hole in the orchard where two of 

 the largest stones were found in the pile of earth, 

 and had apparently tried to force his way into the 

 chipmunk's den. In doing so he had loosened the 

 earth in the groove, softened by the rains, and it 

 had dropped out. The groove was large enough for 

 me to lay my finger in and just adequate to admit 

 the stones into the hole. This, then, was the way the 

 little engineer solved the problem, and I experienced 

 a sense of relief that I had solved mine. 



I visited the second hole where the large stone 

 was in the pile of earth, and found that the same 

 thing had happened there. A red squirrel, bent on 

 plunder, had been trying to break in, and had re- 

 moved the soil in the groove. 1 



1 I feel bound to report that the next season I found a pile 

 80 



