82 WINTER 



birds and beasts to round out their experience and 

 make them keen and strong. 



Happily, the pain and suffering in nature are 

 largely hidden from us. Wild things when stricken 

 " turn their faces to the wall/' retreat, slink silently 

 away out of sight to be alone. They do not wish us 

 to know. But we do know, and we need to know, if 

 we would enter into their lives as a sharer in them ; 

 and if we would enter into and understand the 

 larger, wider, deeper life of which they, and we, and 

 all things, are a part. 



You must pause with me above this little bundle 

 of bones until I tell you their story. 



I had recognized the bones at once as the skele- 

 ton of a muskrat. But it was something peculiar 

 in the way they lay that had caused me to pause. 

 They seemed outstretched, as if composed by gentle 

 hands, the hands of sleep. They had not been flung 

 down. The delicate ribs had fallen in, but not a bone 

 was broken nor displaced, not one showed the splin- 

 ter of shot, or the crack that might have been made 

 by a steel trap. No violence had been done them. 

 They had been touched by nothing rougher than 

 the snow. Out into the hidden runway they had 

 crept. Death had passed by them here ; but no one 

 else in all the winter months. 



The creature had died a " natural " death. It 

 had starved, while a hundred acres of plenty lay 



