252 



ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



The most truculent of all carnivorous animals is per- 

 haps the little pine-marten or martern (Mustela martes], 

 a creature about the size of a fox-squirrel, but capable 

 of killing ten times his own weight in poultry before a 

 squirrel could eat a nut. If one of them gets into a 

 pigeon-house he is apt to make a night of it ; i.e., he will 

 butcher away till daylight interrupts him. Charles Seals- 

 field, who built himself a chalet near Brunnen, in Switzer- 

 land, once caught a pine-marten in flagranti, and, on in- 

 specting the loft of his poultry-house, found forty dead 

 turkeys and half a hundred chickens and pigeons. The 

 murderer had contented himself with tearing their throats : 

 some of the short-necked hens showed no visible injury, 

 and all were in what a poulterer would call a marketable 

 condition. Such wholesale destructiveness can some- 

 times be explained by the needs of a burrowful of 

 hungry whelps ; but pine-martens leave their victims 

 where they drop ; the female suckles her kittens till 

 they can shift for themselves, and never brings any 

 meat home. The little wretches can be trained to fight, 

 and will attack kids, hares, and even pigs ; but, with all 

 their bloodthirst, they are arrant cowards whenever they 

 meet a less helpless creature : the mere sight of a dog 

 is enough to scare them into a mouse-hole. In March 

 the males fight with such a craziness of rage that they 

 tumble from the trees and roll around in the grass, 

 where they have sometimes been killed with a com- 

 mon cudgel. Sealsfield describes a combat of such 



