160 A LITTLE BEAVER 



com bordering the brook, and the root-crop. But 

 his solitary life does not exempt him from danger. 

 When he makes nightly foraging incursions inland 

 the prowling fox may catch his scent drifting on 

 the breeze, and come stealthily up-wind upon 

 him; or the great horned owl may swoop down 

 out of the silence of the night. 



At home the muskrat is not secure from his in- 

 veterate enemy, the mink, whose slender, snake- 

 like body finds easy entrance into his burrow. 



With winter come short commons, scant glean- 

 ings of water-plant roots on the bottom, and long 

 overland tours of exploration, when perhaps a 

 meal-barrel in a hog-house is discovered, or, by 

 greater good fortune, secret entry to a cellar is 

 made, and great store of succulent vegetables come 

 at. But it is likelier that hunger and thirst neces- 

 sitate a return to wider waters. The marsh-bor- 

 dered streams, with their slow, smooth currents, 

 their steady rise and fall of water, their broad 

 meadows of innumerable aquatic plants and great 

 beds of fat lily-roots, are the proper and appointed 

 abiding-places of the muskrats. Here is abundant 

 material for house-building, no current to interfere 

 with the building, or to chafe and wear the house 

 away; and here there is an inexhaustible supply of 

 vegetable and animal food. 



When the waning of summer is calendared by 

 the bloom of goldenrod and aster on the upland. 



