WINTER LARDERS 49 



roadways began to disappear ; and to-day the only well- 

 worn tracks are those that lead into the field a hundred 

 yards or two from their burrows. It may be said in 

 general that they never migrate under the stimulus of a 

 vagrom spirit, but only at the compulsion of over 

 population and the need for food. It is an odd fact 

 and evidence accumulated during the last season seems 

 to me to establish it as a fact that the first animals to 

 emerge of an evening and begin to wander are the old 

 does. Perhaps they are subject to a readier vagrancy 

 because of the instinct to seek nurseries away from the 

 warren and the attention of the bucks, who, as fathers, 

 are as evil as, say, the male partridges are good. 



The rabbit, unlike the rat, is not a thirsty creature. It 

 seems to extract enough moisture from the shoots and 

 the bark that it devours in such quantity* On another 

 part of the same rough ground where the rabbits 

 swarmed, a single small pool of water was formed. Four 

 tracks, and so trite that they were hollowed out a little 

 below the general surface, led to the watering-place ; 

 and the tracks were the tracks of rats, always less straight, 

 but more faithfully followed, and therefore worn, than 

 rabbit paths. The rat, after all, is half a water animal, 

 and must drink or die. It has a good deal of trouble to 

 find food in winter. If there are rats in the neighbour 

 hood it is odds that when winter comes they will find 

 their way into our clamps or other stores of potatoes, 

 carrots, and such food. One of these visitors, finding 

 no convenient hole near such a food-store, made himself 

 a nest almost wholly composed of bits of paper torn into 

 rough pieces about two inches square. There it estab 

 lished itself for the winter, sleeping and eating with com 

 fort and convenience. When .the field mice have finished 

 their stores of nuts or collection of seeds, assembled 



T.V.B. 



