96 THE WEASEL AND THE STOAT (THE ERMINE). 



domesticated stoats among the docks and ware- 

 houses of London or Liverpool ! 



STORAGE. 



The habit of storing food is curiously developed 

 in the land weasels probably because they destroy 

 so much more than they actually require for food 

 that the natural impulse is to cache a certain 

 proportion for a rainy day. But the rainy day 

 seldom or never comes. I have known a weasel 

 to drag five young larks into a cranny under a 

 flat boulder of rock and leave them there, evidently 

 with the idea of returning. Passing the place 

 two or three weeks later, I found the larks still 

 untouched. A weasel family living in a disused 

 lead-mine had caches in every other nook and 

 corner; indeed, anything killed and not for the 

 moment required was tucked into the most con- 

 venient crevice and apparently forgotten. So far 

 as could be judged, none of the stores was ever 

 visited with a view to recovering its contents. 

 The unquenchable thirst of the weasel is for hot 

 blood, and though it will eat almost any filth 

 it finds by way of a change of diet, I cannot 

 imagine any weasel, save perhaps a maimed one, 

 returning to a cold cache for its meal in prefer- 

 ence to pursuing its lifelong march of destruction. 

 In other words, it would be an exceedingly hungry 

 weasel that turned to yesterday's store in prefer- 

 ence to searching for fresh, hot blood ; and since 

 a weasel is never hard pressed for food except 

 under the most unusual conditions, it is curious 

 that it has developed the storage habit so strongly. 



The more a weasel kills, the more it stores, 

 and having spoilt its own hunting on a given 

 range, dotted all up and down with bulging caches, 



