40 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



of several feet. The snow told me what happened 

 next. It was a sad story. The fox had sprung and 

 landed beside the skunk, intending to snap it up 

 like a rabbit. The skunk snapped first. Around the 

 log was a tangle of fox-tracks, with flurries and ridges 

 and holes in the snow where the fox had rolled and 

 burrowed. Out of the farther side a series of tremen- 

 dous bounds showed where a wiser and a smellier fox 

 had departed from that skunk with an initial velocity 

 of close to one mile per minute. Finally, out of the 

 confused circle came the neat, methodical trail of 

 the unruffled skunk as he moved sedately away. 

 Probably to the end of his life the device of a black- 

 and-white tail rampant will always be associated in 

 that fox's mind with the useful maxim, "Mind your 

 own business. " 



Beyond the instructive fable of the fox and the 

 skunk showed lace-work patterns and traceries in 

 the snow where scores and hundreds of the mice- 

 folk had come up from their tunnels beneath the 

 whiteness, and had frolicked and feasted the long 

 night through. Some of these tracks were in little 

 clumps of fours. Each group had a five-fingered pair 

 of large prints in front and a pair of four-fingered 

 tracks just behind. Down the middle ran a tail- 

 mark. They were the tracks of the white-footed or 

 deer-mice. These were the same little robbers which 

 swarmed into my winter camp and gnawed every- 

 thing in sight. Even a flitch of bacon hung on a 

 cord was riddled with their tiny teeth-marks. Only 

 things hung on wires were safe, for their clinging little 



