Skunk 
without seeing so much as one of their footprints during either 
of these months. And again, their tracks will be fairly numerous 
throughout the winter; and this does not depend entirely on the 
mildness or severity of the season either. 
Early in February they are pretty certain to put in an 
appearance, sparingly while the cold weather lasts, but after the 
first really penetrating thaw the snow in all woods is thickly 
punched with their footprints, and for yards about their holes 
it takes on the colour of the dirt brought up from the depths 
on their feet. 
Now that they are fairly awake and hungry, cold weather 
is powerless to keep them indoors. During the still cold nights 
of February they shuffle about over the snow-crust from sunset 
to sunrise, judging from the amount of ground they manage to 
cover each night. 
They are now very different creatures from the heavy-bodied 
sluggards of the autumn. Those that can still boast a goodly layer 
of fat on their ribs must soon part with it. Insects in February 
are so scarce as hardly to be worth considering at all, an oc- 
casional grub or beetle dug out of a moulding stump being 
about all that can be safely counted on at this season. For 
their daily sustenance the skunks are now obliged to kill creatures 
far more active than themselves, and I have always wondered 
how, even in their reduced state of flesh, they can possibly com- 
pete successfully with the foxes and weasels in the chase. 
It is hard to imagine one, even though half famished, making 
so much as a short dash of sufficient speed to enable it to 
seize so swift an animal as a rabbit, yet in one way or another 
they manage to do so quite frequently. It is probable that they 
often succeed in surprising them in their holes, for while the 
wood-chuck burrows, which the rabbits occupy, are nearly always 
constructed with several openings, the simple-minded creatures 
almost invariably make no effort to keep more than one of them 
open, allowing all the rest to become closed with snow and ice 
early in the winter. 
As the snow grows less there is a marked tendency among 
the skunks to abandon the woods and thickets for the more open 
land, where they may hunt for meadow-mice about the newly 
exposed patches of moist turf, and snap up such snakes as have 
been driven from their winter retreats by the melting snow. 
227 
