VERMIN AND TRAPPING 89 
A road-mender, one of Nature’s sportsmen, who 
helped me with ferreting and so forth, came to me 
one morning to say he was coming up a footpath 
along the edge of one of my woods, and had ‘jest 
ketch’d eye on some stooats over agenst’ a small 
bavin-pile. Road-work had to go for a while, and 
we were very soon down there. The first stoat 
to bolt was the crafty old mother, and I missed 
her by a hair’s-breadth, owing to her diving 
through some leaves with which we had stopped a 
hole in a rabbit’s burrow. Having taken precau- 
tions that this should not occur again, I got a 
sequence of eight young stoats, bigger than their 
mother. It is a curious thing, but if you can secure 
the mother of a grown-up litter of stoats you can 
trap them to her, with ease and certainty ; but it is 
quite another matter to trap a mother stoat to her 
dead family. However, in this case I had to try, 
and as it turned out the mother stoat came very 
near proving the exception to the rule. 
I had brought with me a trap that worked 
particularly well, and set it to the eight young 
stoats, so that if their mother came to them she 
would run the gravest risk of having to stay with 
them. But come she did during the following 
night, and, what is more, she removed the whole 
of her family without throwing the trap, or even 
disarranging the palisade of twigs. I thought a 
human being must have removed the bodies. Any- 
