White-focted Mouse 
coffee-like berry that grows abundantly everywhere in the swamps. 
I believe that those living in the evergreen woods are in the way of 
searching for hemlock and spruce seeds scattered by the pine finches 
and cross-bills and other northern birds in their feeding. 
As I have already hinted at, the winter sleep of the white-footed 
mouse does not stretch along unbroken from winter until spring. 
Many of them undoubtedly sleep for periods varying from a few 
days to several weeks perhaps, though it is probable they oftener 
contend themselves with naps of less duration, wakening two or 
three times a day to nibble at the nuts and seeds in their 
granaries, like Esquimaux on the edge of their frozen sea, content 
with narrow quarters and each other’s society so long as they are 
warm and have enough to eat. 
Few of them, however, are so limited for room as are the 
Esquimaux, whether they winter underground or in hollow trees 
and logs buried beneath the snow; every woodchuck’s burrow 
forsaken by its original owner and not yet appropriated by some 
other dweller of the woodland, makes a winter home for several 
families of wood mice who are all the better pleased if the entrance 
has become partially closed and blocked up by the trampling feet of 
cattle, and the slower yet more effective work of frost and rain and 
melting snow. The rest of the burrow remains open and un- 
obstructed for years, one hundred feet or more of warm, dry subway, 
with its chamber stuffed with soft grass for the mice to curl up in as 
they please. 
Yet these little, tender, round-bodied, white-footed mice in no 
way fear the cold; on the bitterest nights of winter when the thick- 
set stars seem close down among the tree-tops, and the frozen wind 
hisses through the stiff branches and the dry snow is piled high 
around the stems of the pines, they are still out in the wind in 
numbers, skipping along the snow from tree to tree. 
In the autumn the lindens furnish them with an abundant 
harvest of little round nuts which they pack away in large quantities 
among the roots of the trees that bear them. Living on these 
and their other stores which they are able to pick up from day to day, 
they generally manage to keep in good condition while the snow and 
cold weather lasts, but they are tremendous eaters and evidently find 
it difficult to get enough once their supplies begin to run short; at any 
rate they get thin and shabby during the spring months before insects 
and berries begin to get abundant again. 
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