go TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
way, I saw no more of that old stoat, and thought 
she had eluded me altogether. But one morning, 
a week afterwards, while I was coming down a 
ride a couple of hundred yards from the scene of 
the mysterious removal, my terrier stood in no 
uncertain way at a small pile of bavins. I had 
just started to roll the bavins apart as best I could 
with my right hand, keeping my gun cleared for 
action with the left, when out whipped a stoat, and 
I blew off her head. Being curious to see what 
plunder she had beneath the bavins, I moved them, 
and there were the eight young stoats I had lost. 
Think of the labour of carting them, each one bigger 
than herself, a distance of two hundred yards! 
Once, having secured part of a litter of stoats, 
and having set traps for the rest, I was waiting a 
while to watch if anything happened, well knowing 
that if only I could get the mother, to secure her 
family would be easy. After about ten minutes, I 
caught sight of her on the end of a birch log, and 
since there was no prospect of a better chance, I 
had a go at her at a good fifty yards. She dived 
into a rabbit-hole without the least sign of being 
hit. But the next morning she was in a trap baited 
with two of her young ones, in spite of a broken 
thigh. The reason why, up to the time when the 
litter breaks up, it is easy to trap young stoats to 
their defunct mother seems to be that, although 
they long since have ceased to obtain milk from her 
