NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 125 



more deer tracks by the sumac bushes before we enter 

 the woods again. Ground-hemlock, old apples, and 

 sumac berries seem to be the favourite winter food of the 

 New England deer. They are also fond of lettuce in 

 season a farmer in Connecticut told me last summer 

 they came into his kitchen garden, not fifty feet from 

 the house, and ate up a whole row of lettuce one night, 

 without touching anything else or even trampling any- 

 thing down. Once more in the woods, the ground grows 

 broken, rising toward the rocks at the base of the 

 mountain. Here we begin to look for the tracks of the 

 fox. But first we come upon cottontail tracks, cen- 

 tring, in our northern woods, around white-oak shoots 

 which are often nibbled down to the snow. Farther 

 south the rabbit eats dogwood shoots. A friend of mine 

 once watched a rabbit feeding close to a young hedge. 

 A red Irish terrier came by, within a few feet. The 

 rabbit, which had just bitten off a shoot six inches long, 

 stopped eating, the shoot still in his mouth, and shrank 

 into an excellent imitation of a lump of earth. The dog 

 passed by within eight feet without seeing him, came 

 back again on the scent, sniffed around, and finally dis- 

 appeared. Meanwhile the rabbit never moved a 

 muscle. When the dog had finally gone, the rabbit 

 went on absorbing the shoot, end foremost, as calmly as 

 if his life had never been in peril. So our rabbit here, by 

 the white-oak twig in the woods, might have done had a 

 fox come by. 



