150 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
sight of an unexpected hole on the other side. I 
managed to stay with him wherever he went, and 
came back all right; yet it is a marvel that none 
of us lost our seats, if not our lives, in that wild 
chase. But we caught the antelope! 
The entrance to the burrow of a badger is much 
larger than that to a prairie-dog’s hole, and no 
hillock is raised about it. It reaches below the 
frost-line, and may be almost any length. The 
animal changes its abode frequently, and con- 
stantly digs more holes than it needs, thereby sav- 
ing a great deal of labor for coyotes, foxes, ferrets, 
etc., who take possession of its abandoned en- 
trenchments and probably are welcome to them. 
They form a retreat for snakes, too, Dr. Suckley 
making the gruesome note that in western Minne- 
sota, about 1857, he found old badger-earths in- 
habited by vast numbers of a gregarious species 
of garter-snake: “I have seen at times, at the bot- 
tom of a vacated hole, a dozen or more in a knot 
—the writhing, excessively serpentine mass dis- 
gusting all but the naturalist.” The rattlesnake 
is a frequent and dangerous tenant in the South- 
west; and the prairie-owl a comical one. 
This ubiquitous turning up of the soil, by which, 
within a century or less, over the widest districts, 
every square yard of earth, to the depth of several 
feet, must be brought to the surface, and exposed 
to the air, while an enormous amount of fertilizing 
material has, meanwhile, been dragged into the 
