40 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
of several feet. The snow told me what happened 
next. It wasa sad story. The fox had sprung and 
landed beside the skunk, intending to snap it up 
like a rabbit. The skunk snapped first. Around the 
log was a tangle of fox-tracks, with flurries and ridges 
and holes in the snow where the fox had rolled and 
burrowed. Out of the farther side a series of tremen- 
dous bounds showed where a wiser and a smellier fox 
had departed from that skunk with an initial velocity 
of close to one mile per minute. Finally, out of the 
confused circle came the neat, methodical trail of 
the unruffled skunk as he moved sedately away. 
Probably to the end of his life the device of a black- 
and-white tail rampant will always be associated in 
that fox’s mind with the useful maxim, “Mind your 
own business.” 
Beyond the instructive fable of the fox and the 
skunk showed lace-work patterns and traceries in 
the snow where scores and hundreds of the mice- 
folk had come up from their tunnels beneath the 
whiteness, and had frolicked and feasted the long 
night through. Some of these tracks were in little 
clumps of fours. Each group had a five-fingered pair 
of large prints in front and a pair of four-fingered 
tracks just behind. Down the middle ran a tail- 
mark. They were the tracks of the white-footed or 
deer-mice. These were the same little robbers which 
swarmed into my winter camp and gnawed every- 
thing in sight. Even a flitch of bacon hung on a 
cord was riddled with their tiny teeth-marks. Only 
things hung on wires were safe, for their clinging little 
