lO 
NATURE study. 
him away, and no dragon-fly nymph could catch him in 
its queer trap. No fish could eat him unless lugger than 
he was, and few that were big enough came up his way. 
So in course of time he began to take .short excursions, 
darting quickly from one patch of pickerel weed to an¬ 
other—sometimes up the brook, and .sometimes a little way 
along the shore of the lake. 
On his trips up .stream he .sometimes saw members of a 
muskrat family that had a home in a hole under a bank. 
The old muskrats had belonged to other families that 
lived through the previous winter in large haystack-like 
houses in a bog or marsh farther up the brook ; but late in 
spring, when the freshet was over, they had dug this hole 
and made a ne.st for themselves and their young at the far¬ 
ther end of it. The entrance to this hole was under water 
at the bottom of the brook, and was hidden by a mass of 
twigs, leaves and dead grass which the muskrats had 
spread over it. The hole rose under the bank, so that the 
ne.st at the end was high above the water and quite dry— 
at any rate, dry enough for mu.skrats. 
Pike often saw one of the old muskrats come swimming 
down the brook, his nose just at the top of the water. 
When it was near the brown pile of twigs and grass, it 
would dive into the midst of it, making a great stir and 
roiling the water for some distance round. When the 
water cleared, the muskrat was nowhere to be seen. 
It looked to Pike as if the muskrat had hid in the pile of 
rubbish at the bottom of the brook ; and that was what the 
little boy thought when he and the little girl came one day 
with an alder pole, a piece of string and a bent pin to fish 
for minnows. The muskrat came swimming down in a 
great hurry, with a big piece of cow-lily root in its mouth, 
and suddenly disappeared. 
“He has hid in that old pile of stuff,’’ said the boy. 
“ See me drive him out! ’’ 
