268 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
that fixity of purpose that only the devotee of 
method can attain to. Even the pet in your house, 
kept warm the year through, will curl up in his 
kennel (or, better, in your cellar) and be indifferent 
to the world until his duty of sleep has been ful- 
filled. Pick him up, and you will think him dead, 
so rigid, cold, and insensible is he. Only the most 
delicate instruments show that his heart beats and 
that the blood still oozes sluggishly through his 
inert veins. He will survive for hours in a jar of 
carbonic-acid gas, where he would drown, when 
awake, in two minutes. It is true that you may 
carefully thaw him out, but the moment you let 
him alone he will drop into slumber again, regard- 
less of temperature. And so his winter passes in 
one long dream of summer. 
Could anything be sweeter or more convenient? 
Having only provided a shelter, he forthwith rids 
himself of winter. He need make no other 
preparation. Wrapped in his own fur, warmed 
and fed by the slow consumption of the fat which 
it was the supreme pleasure of his life to acquire, 
apathetic to cold, hunger, fear, or fretting, he 
escapes not only the famine and freezing to which 
such animals as are abroad all the year are ex- 
posed, but the hard work required of those, like 
the chipmunk, which must fill a storehouse in 
advance, in order to feed during the months of 
scarcity. Ah, he is a canny old marmot! 
But, sad to say, few things in this world are 
