LITTLE BEASTS OF FIELD AND WOOD 



dom from trappers. For after a few months of 

 experience with traps, the survivors learn to 

 avoid them so successfully as to render their 

 further pursuit unprofitable, and the trapper must 

 move on to new hunting-grounds — though they 

 generally forget their cautiousness during the 

 succeeding summer, and by autumn are as un- 

 suspecting as ever. 



In summer they live in burrows reaching well 

 up into the banks and only a few inches below the 

 turf. When the water is very low at midsummer, 

 they dig canals from the lowest openings to the 

 .channel, or perhaps these canals are simply 

 burrows that have caved in, — at any rate, they 

 serve as paths down which the muskrats swim or 

 wade to their feeding-grounds. Most of the 

 burrows are dug in August or September, and at 

 that season I often come upon streams roiled by 

 their digging, and, following up the bank, some- 

 times for a dozen rods or more, I have discovered 

 them at work at it. 



154 



