SNOW STORIES 43 
and, failing to find food, starve before the sun is half 
way down the sky. As the shrew does not hibernate, 
his whole life is a swift hunt for food; for every 
day this apparently eyeless, earless animal must eat 
its own weight in flesh. The weasels kill from blood- 
lust, but the shrews kill for their very life’s sake. 
It is a fearsome sight to see a shrew attack a mouse. 
The mouse bites. The shrew eats. Boring in, the 
shrew secures a grip with its long, crooked, crocodile 
jaws filled with fierce teeth, and devours its way like 
fire through skin and flesh and bone, worrying out 
and swallowing mouthfuls of blood and flesh until 
the mouse falls over dead. This tiny beastling, the 
masked shrew, must be weighed by troy weight, and 
tips a jeweler’s scale at less than forty-five grains. 
To-day the snow said the shrew had been an un- 
bidden and unwelcome guest at the mice-dinner. 
At first the mice-trails were massed together in a 
maze of tracks. Where the trail of the shrew touched 
the circle, there shot out separate lines of mice- 
tracks, like the spokes of a wheel, with the paw- 
marks far apart, showing that the guests had all 
sprung up from the laden table of the snow and 
dashed off in different directions. The shrew-track 
circled faintly here and there, ran for some distance 
in a long straight trail, and—stopped. The Sword 
of Damocles, which hangs forever over the head of 
all the little wild-folk, had fallen. The shrew was 
gone. A tiny fleck of blood and a single track like a 
great X on the snow told the tale of his passing. 
All his fierceness and courage availed nothing when 
