WAYS OF NATURE 
can easily believe the story Charles St. John tells of 
the fox he saw waylaying some hares, and which, 
to screen himself the more completely from his 
quarry, scraped a small hollow in the ground and 
threw up the sand about it. But if St. John had said 
that the fox brought weeds or brush to make himself 
a blind, as the hunter often does, I should have dis- 
credited him, just as I discredit the observation of 
a man quoted by Romanes, who says that jackals, 
ambushing deer at the latter’s watering-place, de- 
liberately wait till the deer have filled themselves 
with water, knowing that in that state they are more 
easily run down and captured! 
President Roosevelt, in “’The Wilderness Hunter,” 
— a book, by the way, of even deeper interest to the 
naturalist than to the sportsman, — says that the 
moose has to the hunter the “very provoking habit 
of making a half or three-quarters circle before lying 
down, and then crouching with its head so turned 
that it can surely perceive any pursuer who may fol- 
low its trail.’ This is the cunning of the moose 
developed through-long generations of its hunted 
and wolf-pursued ancestors,—a cunning that does 
not differ from that of a man under the same circum- 
stances, though, of course, it is not the result of the 
same process of reasoning. 
I have known a chipping sparrow to build her nest 
on a grape-vine just beneath a bunch of small green 
grapes. Soon the bunch grew and lengthened and 
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