202 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



rabbit last winter I came upon the record of a noc- 

 turnal tragedy by the roadside. On one side of 

 the road was a wire fence, with wooden posts, and 

 the grass beneath had been cropped close, so that 

 the snow made a clean carpet. For at least two 

 hundred yards a weasel had gone along under the 

 fence, passing one post to the north, the next to the 

 south, the next to the north, with the regularity of 

 a shuttle in a loom. Just why he did this I have no 

 idea, unless he found it aided him in keeping close 

 to the slight protection the fence afforded. After 

 following him some distance I saw a field, or meadow, 

 mouse track, which came across the road. The 

 mouse was headed for the fence where the weasel 

 walked, evidently intending to pass beneath it. 

 His tracks abruptly ended six feet short of the wire. 

 The tracks of the weasel showed why. That sav- 

 age little hunter had made one spring and landed 

 on the mouse. There was no sign of blood, but it 

 was evident that the weasel had carried off his prey, 

 deserting the wire fence and cutting across a corner 

 of the field to a hedgerow of tangled briers and sap- 

 lings. 



The poor field-mice have many foes owls, hawks, 

 crows, cats, even foxes. I have seen a barn cat 

 which hunted much in an old orchard bring in half 

 a dozen mice daily from the long grass under the 

 apple-trees. These short-tailed, burrowing mice, 

 which live in fields and meadows, remain abundant, 

 however. They probably do a great deal of dam- 

 age, in the aggregate, eating corn and grain in the 

 shocks, ringing the tender bark of young fruit-trees 

 under the snow, destroying bulbs in the ground, 



