VERMIN AND TRAPPING 89 



A road-mender, one of Nature's sportsmen, who 

 helped me with ferreting and so forth, came to me 

 one morning to say he was coming up a footpath 

 along the edge of one of my woods, and had 'jest 

 ketch'd eye on some stooats over agenst' a small 

 bavin-pile. Road-work had to go for a while, and 

 we were very soon down there. The first stoat 

 to bolt was the crafty old mother, and I missed 

 her by a hair's -breadth, owing to her diving 

 through some leaves with which we had stopped a 

 hole in a rabbit's burrow. Having taken precau- 

 tions that this should not occur again, I got a 

 sequence of eight young stoats, bigger than their 

 mother. It is a curious thing, but if you can secure 

 the mother of a grown-up litter of stoats you can 

 trap them to her, with ease and certainty ; but it is 

 quite another matter to trap a mother stoat to her 

 dead family. However, in this case I had to try, 

 and as it turned out the mother stoat came very 

 near proving the exception to the rule. 



I had brought with me a trap that worked 

 particularly well, and set it to the eight young 

 stoats, so that if their mother came to them she 

 would run the gravest risk of having to stay with 

 them. But come she did during the following 

 night, and, what is more, she removed the whole 

 of her family without throwing the trap, or even 

 disarranging the palisade of twigs. I thought a 

 human being must have removed the bodies. Any- 



