THE ANIMAL DISLIKE OF SOLITUDE 33 



ing with a central guard-room, in which the owner 

 eats and grows fat until the hardest frosts begin, 

 when he curls himself up to sleep until the spring. 

 But this life of leisure does not begin until the 

 harvest has been gathered. While the crops are 

 ripening the hamsters work incessantly to increase 

 their hoards, and as much as three hundredweight of 

 grain and beans have been taken from a single burrow. 

 After harvest, the peasants often search with probes 

 for the treasure-chambers of the robbers, and no doubt 

 exact a heavy tribute from the hamster's stores. 

 But these hoarding propensities are not enough to 

 account for the anti-social disposition of the hamster. 

 The sociable squirrels also make a hoard, though 

 in a careless, slap-dash fashion suited to their mercurial 

 character. (It is certain that they often forget where 

 they have buried their treasures, for during a wet 

 summer, young hazels and horse-chestnuts sprout in 

 all sorts of strange sites in the writer's garden, between 

 the roots of rose bushes and in flower borders, where 

 the squirrels must have hidden them in the autumn.) 

 There is another little rodent, the pika or calling- 

 hare, which is obliged, like the hamster, to make 

 some provision for the winter, but lives, like the 

 marmots of the Alps, in sociable colonies. 



The pikas inhabit the desolate steppes which 

 stretch from the Crimea across Central Asia, and 



c 



