SNOW STORIES 43 



and, failing to find food, starve before the sun is half 

 way down the sky. As the shrew does not hibernate, 

 his whole life is a swift hunt for food; for every 

 day this apparently eyeless, earless animal must eat 

 its own weight in flesh. The weasels kill from blood- 

 lust, but the shrews kill for their very life's sake. 

 It is a fearsome sight to see a shrew attack a mouse. 

 The mouse bites. The shrew eats. Boring in, the 

 shrew secures a grip with its long, crooked, crocodile 

 jaws filled with fierce teeth, and devours its way like 

 fire through skin and flesh and bone, worrying out 

 and swallowing mouthfuls of blood and flesh until 

 the mouse falls over dead. This tiny beastling, the 

 masked shrew, must be weighed by troy weight, and 

 tips a jeweler's scale at less than forty -five grains. 



To-day the snow said the shrew had been an un- 

 bidden and unwelcome guest at the mice-dinner. 

 At first the mice-trails were massed together in a 

 maze of tracks. Where the trail of the shrew touched 

 the circle, there shot out separate lines of mice- 

 tracks, like the spokes of a wheel, with the paw- 

 marks far apart, showing that the guests had all 

 sprung up from the laden table of the snow and 

 dashed off in different directions. The shrew-track 

 circled faintly here and there, ran for some distance 

 in a long straight trail, and — stopped. The Sword 

 of Damocles, which hangs forever over the head of 

 all the little wild-folk, had fallen. The shrew was 

 gone. A tiny fleck of blood and a single track like a 

 great X on the snow told the tale of his passing. 

 All his fierceness and courage availed nothing when 



