WINTER ANIMALS, 
295 
cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and 
played with his food, tasting only the inside of the ker¬ 
nel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick 
by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to 
the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludi¬ 
crous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it 
had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it 
again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, 
then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the 
little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a 
forenoon ; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper 
one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully bal¬ 
ancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a 
tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and 
frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were 
too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its 
fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizon¬ 
tal, being determined to put it through at any rate; — 
a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow; — and so 
he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps 
carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods dis¬ 
tant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about 
the woods in various directions. 
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams 
were heard long before, as they were warily making 
their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy 
and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer 
and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels 
have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, 
they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which 
is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after 
great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in 
the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their 
