78 Field and Forest Rambles. 



CHAPTER III. 



A spect of the Forest after a Snow-storm — Tracks of Wild Animals on the 

 Snow — Hare ; its changes of Pile — Adaptation of the Feet of Wild 

 Animals for Snow Travelling — Feet of Moose and Caribou compared — 

 Their Habits — Extermination — Moose and Irish Elk compared— On 

 the Interment of Fossil Deer— Enormous Horns of Moose — Modes of 

 Hunting the Native Deer — Origin of Moss Swamps and Caribou 

 Barrens — The Pitcher Plant — Beaver ; its Habits and Extermination — 

 Musk Rat — Porcupine, small Muridae — Bats — Squirrels — Melanism 

 — Flying Squirrels — Effects of the Climate on European Brown Rat 

 and Mouse. 



THE perfect stillness of a Canadian forest during or im- 

 mediately after a heavy fall of snow is something remark- 

 able ; solemn silence reigns supreme, for it is no longer broken 

 by the cracking or creaking of branches, or the notes and forms 

 of bird or beast. The scenery is also changed ; you wander 

 down some familiar pathway to find it transmuted into what 

 recollections might suggest in a Christmas pantomime. Here, 

 the pines and spruces, with their boughs overburdened with snow, 

 slope downward, whilst masses are piled up round the trunks, 

 and those of the leafless maples and deciduous leaved trees 

 which stand out in spectre-like ugliness. The enormous accumu- 

 lations of snow on the branches of spruce and pine trees would 

 appear to act mechanically by their dead weight, hence it may 

 be from this cause that the boughs have attained the grace- 

 ful downward swoop so characteristic of the conifers of high 

 latitudes, inasmuch as the fibres become outstretched, so that 

 even on relieving a branch of its load of snow it will only 

 partially return to the horizontal. We may on like occasions 

 estimate the numbers of quadrupeds in a district by their 



