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principally nocturnal and somewhat gregarious, several pairs construct- 
ing and occupying the same houses and burrows. These latter are nu- 
merous and extensive galleries in the banks of ponds, marshes, or 
sluggish streams. In the burrows the young are usually brought forth, 
and to them the animals resort when driven from their houses in winter. 
The entrance to both the burrows and houses are under water. — 
The houses are built in water three or four feet ‘deep, out of the cur- 
rent. They are principally of rushes, although coarse grass, sedges, 
sticks, and leaves are piled up with the rushes, and the whole well 
plastered together with mud. These houses are built in the fall and oc- 
cupied through the winter. Sometimes, in wide prairie marshes, the 
young are brought forth in the houses; in that case, but one female occu- 
pies a house. If the water course has dry banks, the burrows are usually 
at the edge of the water; but in some wide sloughs the burrows are 
several rods from the water-mark, in some elevated spot; in such cases 
they are approached by a gallery excavated the entire distance from the 
water to the burrow under the soil. In the piles of rushes—which some- 
times are so abundant in a marsh as to suggest, by their large size and 
well-rounded tops, a crop of marsh grass thrown into bunches ready for 
the hay wagon—are the chambers occupied by the animal. ‘The entrance 
may be in the center, when there is a shelf completely around it and 
above water, on which the Muskrats sleep; again, the entrance is at the 
side—but under water in either case. Often, in winter, in the large 
marshes about Chicago, the hunter, sometimes on skates, takes them by 
thrusting sharp-pronged spears through the top and sides of the houses 
into the nest. Two, and even three, are taken sometimes in this way at 
one thrust. : 
Muskrats are not suspicious; they are easily trapped in steel-traps 
placed in their runways. In former years, when the fur was used for 
napping “ beaver hats,” Muskrats were worth more than Mink, the skins 
selling for from forty to fifty cents. Like other furs, their value depends 
on the caprice of fashion. The introduction of silk hats, according to 
Mr. Kennicott, reduced the price of the skins to from six and one-quarter 
to fifteen cents, and trapping them was almost abandoned as unprofit- 
able. Of late years they have been in demand for gloves, caps, and some 
articles of ladies’ furs, and have sold at from fifteen to thirty cents. 
The Muskrat comes out on the ice, at times, to sun itself, and in spring 
may often be seen swimming about, or, like turtles, basking on logs in 
the sun. The author has seen them shot by duck-hunters, when thus 
exposed, on the Calumet River, in Illinois. 
The winter food of this species is, according to Mr. Kennicott, the roots 
