IS IT WINTER? 85 
elsewhere, but he is not very abundant, and his 
place is sometimes taken by the comical wood-rat, 
whose curious habits are not destructive to anything 
but your nerves, until you find out the cause of those 
eerie noises that render the night uneasy. 
The chipmunk is all too easily tamed, but, what 
we plume ourselves upon as a rare occurrence, we 
once had a family of woodchucks living under our 
porch. They came out at dawn, like so many little 
bears, and we watched their clumsy yet sinuous 
movements through the flowers, and we saw them 
sit up and with their hands draw down our best 
pinks and eat off all the blossoms. 
If gray squirrels are not abundant, rabbits are. 
Hunting does not seem to thin their ranks. You 
often see a bright round eye turned square upon you, 
as you are walking through the woods. It belongs 
to Molly Cottontail, sitting under a bush, as still as 
a mouse, with that great eye sentinel over a danger- 
ous world. If you pause or leave the path, she is off, 
a vanishing mist of gray fur. There are rabbit paths 
everywhere in the bushes, so that one must needs be 
careful, and not stray away into these curious high- 
ways of the furry folk that go nowhere that man, or 
dog, can follow, but lead the unwary into thickets 
of bushes tied together by prickly vines. Close to 
the ground the little path tunnels its way, but one 
would need be as small as the rabbit to follow it. 
There are places where one, watching quietly at 
night, can see the rabbits at play. And when snow 
is on the ground, who but they make those double 
