HARD TAKE 55 



fence near the woods, was attacked, and more than 

 half denuded of its bark. The object of the squir- 

 rels seemed to be to get at the soft, white, muci- 

 laginous substance (cambium layer) between the 

 bark and the wood. The ground was covered with 

 fragments of the bark, and the white, naked stems 

 and branches had been scraped by fine teeth. 

 When the sap starts in the early spring, the squir- 

 rels add this to their scanty supplies. They perfo- 

 rate the bark of the branches of the maples with 

 their chisel-like teeth, and suck the sweet liquid 

 as it slowly oozes out. It is not much as food, but 

 evidently it helps. 



I have said the red squirrel does not lay by a 

 store of food for winter use, like the chipmunk and 

 the wood-mice; yet in the fall he sometimes hoards 

 in a tentative, temporary kind of way. I have seen 

 his savings — butternuts and black walnuts — stuck 

 here and there in saplings and trees near his nest; 

 sometimes carefully inserted in the upright fork of 

 a limb or twig. One day, late in November, I 

 counted a dozen or more black walnuts put away in 

 this manner in a little grove of locusts, chestnuts, 

 and maples by the roadside, and could but smile 

 at the wise forethought of the rascally squirrel. 

 His supplies were probably safer that way than if 

 more elaborately hidden. They were well distrib- 

 uted; his eggs were not all in one basket, and he 

 could go away from home without any fear that his 

 storehouse would be broken into in his absence. 

 The next week, when I passed that way, the nuts 



