99 *^® mouse that never drinks 



So far as I am concerned there is, I say, nothing odd 

 about this. But there is something very odd indeed about 

 my companions. In fact the kangaroo rat is famous as "the 

 mouse that never drinks," and because of his incredible 

 abstention from all potations, he has attracted the atten- 

 tion — considerably more unwelcome than mine — of labo- 

 ratory scientists w^ho have analyzed his blood, examined 

 his urine, and imposed fantastically abnormal conditions 

 upon him to force him to break his inveterate teetotalism. 



They find that it can be done. But it is not certain that 

 in nature he ever does so. Obviously he is the most tri- 

 umphant imaginable example of adaptation to the most 

 characteristic desert diflSculty, the absence of v^ater. It is 

 no w^onder that the largest of all the kangaroo rats lives in 

 Death Valley, the hottest and driest spot in the United 

 States, w^here it sometimes never rains at all for a year and 

 more. To get along w^ithout is the most radical solution 

 in any economy of scarcity. 



In the appearance of the sleek little creatures there is 

 nothing to suggest the underprivileged. Their manner is 

 exuberant and, unlike many desert plants, they do not look 

 at all desiccated — which as a matter of fact they are not. 

 You would never suspect that they did not drink like any 

 other flourishing animal. In fact it is hard to beheve that 

 they don't. And to realise fully just how extraordinary that 

 fact is one should know them personally as well as tech- 

 nically. But let us begin with technicaHties. 



From the zoologist's standpoint the kangaroo rat is 

 actually neither a rat nor a mouse because he belongs to a 

 different order of the rodent family, one of the reasons 

 being that he has twenty teeth while both Rattus and Mus 

 have to get along with only sixteen. Still, his general ap- 



