Small Deer

T HERE is always the pleasure of surprise in the sight of a truly wild animal, or of its traces. We have become so habituated to the idea that the world—or, at any rate, our part of it—has been thoroughly tamed, that there is salt, as the French say, in the thought that somewhat of the primitive and savage is yet left to us. I remember very well the astonishment of a suburban housewife at finding a shrew one morning in a tin pail left out over night. She had never dreamed that there existed so tiny a mammal, much less that it dwelt in her garden. It was so small she could hide it in her closed hand—all except a long, flexible, proboscis-like nose, pink and tender, that waved about and up and down like a miniature elephant's trunk, and was plainly the creature's chief bureau of information. The fur was blue-gray and exquisitely soft—velvet is rough in comparison; the ears close set, the tail short, and the white feet, each toe perfectly modelled, so delicate that a magnifying-glass was needed to fully display their beauty.

A few nights afterwards two others were taken in a similar unintended and unbaited trap. Both were dead, although entirely unhurt. Did they die simply of fright? There seems to be no other explanation; yet it "comports not well" with the shrew's courage and endurance. Shrieking like an angry vixen, it will face fearlessly and fairly whip the heavy field-mouse; and in captivity it is necessary to keep these morsels of pugnacity apart or they will fight incessantly, and, if possible, kill the weaker of their fellow-prisoners. Their teeth, set in an even row round their jaws, are like needles, and can pierce and hold the most slippery beetle or liveliest worm.

Shrews are really very common, and in the warmer States extremely numerous, but they rarely come abroad except at night from their homes under logs and stones, where they creep out through tiny tunnels among the grass and beneath fallen leaves that sharp eyes only may trace. One more often picks up their dead bodies in the woods than those of any other mammal—gashed by sharp teeth or claws, very likely, but uneaten. These have been struck down by some owl or weasel or cat, and then rejected in disgust, for they possess a vile odor. Ignorant or careless that they are an important part of nature's police against injurious insects, the farmer usually crushes the shrew beneath his heel as he would a mouse where-ever he finds it; and in some parts of the country the European superstition still lingers that shrews will poison cattle by biting them, or will give them lameness by running across a limb.

Shrews grade through intermediate forms into the moles, whose lives seem the most circumscribed and uneventful of all quadrupeds. It is a hard fate that has driven these creatures underground, for they are given no easement of these conditions, are never permitted to come outside at all, where their powerful fore-limbs and wonderful armature of digging claws are as useless as they are grotesque. Yet the distance anatomically is small between these helpless, shapeless delvers after earthworms and the marvellously agile bats, that, by a modification of the forelimbs at the other extreme, flit and tumble boozily about us in the dusk, or chase dodging moths by the light of the moon. Country people warn you that should a bat get into your hair dreadful things would follow; but who has had such an experience? I feel that the thatch of my  head is safe from such intrusion—as safe as are my ears from invasion by devil's-darning-needles. By-the-way, did one ever see a bat catch a dragon-fly? That would be an acrobatic performance worth risking much malaria to witness. Swallows can do it.

Most small mammals, in fact, are mainly nocturnal, owing to the competition of more powerful beasts, that has acted against them in a double way—first, by direct antagonism and, second, indirectly, by forcing the prey of the smaller and weaker brethren into a nocturnal life. The reaction of this, however, compels the larger ones to hunt principally during the darker hours.

This is one reason why we meet so few of the woodland quadrupeds in our walks. Not many, to be sure, are there to be seen, even if we did not scare them out of sight by our noise. They can avoid our eyes well enough in most cases simply by remaining quiet. That is the self-protection of the earth-colored rabbit. A gray squirrel, flattened on the bark of a tree-trunk, his tail extended like a broad feather, is usually safe when quiet, but this is never for any length of time, for his nervousness and curiosity are beyond holding in. Your eye catches a ripple of light, and you know that an irrepressible wave of energy has insisted upon expression, and the next instant the gray is on the opposite side of the tree, with only a sooty nose and ear visible, and an eye like a big jet bead. The red squirrel will control his emotional tail better, but if his patience is tried too long a burst of chattering c-r-r-r-r-r-acks the silence of the grove.

Though the tree-squirrels will never sit still long under your gaze, the chipmunk will sometimes do so, apparently with as studious an interest as you take in him. A young lady described to me lately how one day last summer she was sitting on a stone wall, when a chipmunk crept out of its crevice near by and sat perfectly quiet, watching her with the utmost intentness. Her casual movements startled him a little from time to time, but he never took his eyes off her, until at last she became so uneasy under his uncanny scrutiny that she ran away to escape it. This was a quaint reversal of the old notion of the human eye being able to stare a wild animal into submission.

An acquaintance surprised me the other day by the question, "What is a chipmunk—how does he differ from a squirrel?" I thought everybody knew this gay sprite of the road-sides. He is a true squirrel, about the size of the common red one, and of the same reddish tone, which, like his brother of the trees, is much brighter in winter than in summer, when the long, warm, handsome fur, suitable for cold weather and the nuptial time, is replaced by a warm-weather suit of a cooler, shorter, and paler sort. His distinguishing marks are two white stripes along the side of the back from the fore-shoulder to the root of the tail, each bordered by a black line, making him the prettiest of our lesser quadrupeds, and giving to him, as with erect ears and trailing, bushy tail he scuds along the fence or scampers in and out of a brush-pile—for he is a true ground-squirrel, rarely going even upon the trunk of a tree—an air of dandy pride and alertness that is most engaging. In the Far West there are four-lined and checkered ones.

Our chipmunk is the familiar of the old stone wall, and where, in some parts of the country, these are disappearing, the chipmunk is disappearing too, while many a skunk and woodchuck also find themselves dispossessed.

How interested in you any wild creature becomes when he finds you in the novel attitude of complete quiet! I was once lying upon a rock at the wooded edge of Tidyaskung Lake, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, closely observing the persistent effort of a small water-snake to drag out from among some stones a large sun-fish, when I suddenly became aware that I, too, was under observation. A mink was standing not six feet away, his head turned on one side and his bright, black eyes regarding me intently. Probably he had had designs on the snake and its prize when his nose, rather than his eyes, detected my presence. I scarcely lifted an eyelid, and slowly one small, velvety, black paw was raised and set noiselessly down after the other as he crept a little forward, as though to get a better view. So I watched him and he watched me—what a chance it would have been for that new order of sportsmen, the field photographers!—his round head with its great, bead-like eyes, the sensitive nostril sniffing the air suspiciously, the lithe body tense and ready for a spring, one paw held up like an eager terrier's, and wonder shown in his whole pose. I suppose I made some involuntary movement, and he vanished into the shadow of a thicket, out of which sprang like a rocket a startled woodcock!

Such inquisitiveness is characteristic of nearly all animals, but especially of the squirrel kind. Prairie-dogs and gophers will come out of their holes when they hear an approaching footstep and "sit up "on their hillocks, barking with excitement till the last minute they dare, to see what the intruder into their domain is about. Red squirrels will creep along a fence-rail or log to get a nearer view of you as you sit eating your luncheon, then scud away in a burst of panic and chatter when you turn your head; and the curiosity of the big gray is notorious.

It is amusing to see this fellow slide down a tree, with wide-spread legs and outstretched head, by slower and slower advances, while some creature—perhaps a sleepy dog, perhaps a poet weaving his rhymes or a girl her daisy chain—rests quietly at its roots. I have seen a brave old gray go almost within touch of such a figure before some chance motion would alarm it, and the next instant an indignant bunny would be hurling invectives, jerking his plume-like tail viciously the while, from the security of a lofty perch.

This inquisitiveness, which leads animals to try to examine closely anything strange, is taken advantage of by the larger beasts who seek them as food. The puma of the Pampas, when he is hungry for a dinner and has found a herd of guanacos, simply lies down and lets his presence become known. The foolish guanacos circle about nearer and nearer, craning their long necks, until they have come within leaping distance, and the great cat strikes one down. So "rats and mice and such small deer," and less often the wide-awake squirrels, fall victims to serpents by approaching too close in order to study the reptile, which they seem not to recognize and flee from until struck at; at any rate, a mouse placed in a cage with a captive snake rarely exhibits any fear or distrust. This is an instructive fact, and goes against the prevalent belief that all wild animals have an intuitive dread of "natural enemies"; Professor Lloyd Morgan and other experimenters have shown, indeed, that very young chicks are no more moved by the appearance of a hawk than by that of their own mother. A man can make friends with young animals as easily as not if he behaves gently. I once picked up and brought to camp an elk calf so large I could hardly lift it without its showing the slightest resistance or apprehension, and patient and sympathetic persons easily make friends with some of the liveliest denizens of the forest. One of the accompanying illustrations shows the friendly relations established between some sojourners in the White Mountains and a family of chipmunks, which came familiarly to these persons for food, and were photographed in a dozen pretty "poses." Many similar friendships of the summer woods might be cited.

A lady who lives near Boston wrote me not long ago of a female gray squirrel whose confidence she had won in this way. "It was not only for the nuts I gave her," says my correspondent, with proper pride, "for she would stop eating a nut to come down the tree trunk, spring on to my arm or shoulder, and let me carry her along the street for a quarter of a mile." This squirrel would sit beside the lady on the piazza-steps, curl up in her hands or lap or the bend of her arm, and stay quiet until put on the ground and told to go home. She would come in at the window, cross the room and climb upon her friend's knee, and often followed her some distance down the street, barking softly if the lady did not speak to her or stroke her back. The same squirrel brought her babies one day to show them to her host, although it cost her an hour of coaxing to persuade them to follow her from the brush-protected fence across the driveway to the porch. Any one who has watched the patient, anxious way in which the squirrel-mothers (for the fathers are away at this time disporting themselves, heedless of domestic cares) encourage their youngsters to venture out upon the shaky limbs, and instruct them in general, can well understand the relief of this little mother when she had brought the kittens safely to the side of their protectress. How human it was! At another time several squirrels used to come to this lady's window, where she fed them, and they had a habit, when climbing about her, of nibbling her ears. "It is never painful or rough," she writes, "but is evidently a caress." Such, no doubt, were their endearments to each other.

The popular notion that squirrels of all sorts subsist wholly on nuts arises from limited, not to say careless, observation. Their food is widely varied in the course of a year, especially in the spring and summer. Indian corn in the milk suffers more from squirrels than from raccoons or muskrats, which are proverbially so fond of it. In places on the Western frontier an expensive system of watching has had to be maintained at times against this pest. One dainty in late summer is the mushroom, of several varieties of which they are fond; and this reminds me of a bit of unexpected sagacity in one of the Western chipmunks lately spoken of in my hearing by an observer of it. It appears that this chipmunk depends for its ordinary fall and winter fare upon the seeds of the piñion pine, which it preserves by storage in its holes in decayed stumps or underground. It happened lately, however, that in a certain area of the Northwest the piñion crop was a complete failure, and the ground-squirrels were compelled to find something else for their subsistence and winter stores. In this extremity they turned to the mushrooms, everywhere abundant, and were busy during all the late autumn in gathering them. They were too wise, however, to store them underground, where they would soon have rotted, but instead deposited them in notches and crotches of the lower branches of the forest trees, where they dried in the open air and so kept in good condition to be eaten. Their shrivelling up and the shaking of the branches by the winds caused many to fall, and these the squirrels industriously picked up and tried to fasten more securely to the branches.

This method of providing themselves with winter food implied the necessity of their coming forth from their underground retreats, no matter how cold and snowy the weather, whenever they wanted something to eat, instead of having their larder in-doors as is usual with them; and it would be interesting to know whether they actually did so, or whether they failed to profit, after all, by their seemingly sagacious prudence.

The worst enemy of the squirrels, chipmunks, and all other "small deer" in the Eastern woods is the weasel, of which naturalists distinguish two or three species, until lately confounded and even regarded as identical with the European ermine. To him day and night are alike, winter has no terrors, and all castles are unlocked. He does not need the opportunity offered by the farmer's poultry-yard to enable him to live merrily in the midst of civilization.

The civilization of the country, indeed, has worked to the advantage rather than otherwise of most of the lesser mammals, which are favored by man's operations in various ways. For the raccoon he cultivates miles of rows of sweet corn, and for the woodchuck provides a vast expanse of grass-land and garden-patches. He has fought for the opossum and the skunk the battle of the weak against wildcat and wolf, and has enabled the former to extend its domain east of the Hudson River, where it was not primitively known—that great stream having proved an apparently insurmountable barrier to the spread of our comical little marsupial; and for both of them he nurtures a vast increase of insect-food and sundry luxuries that the woodland bill of fare did not often afford. The porcupine he tolerates as an amusing companion of his woodcutting, sugar-making, and fishing camps, and for fox and weasel the farmer's wife rears excellent poultry. It is for the mink and otter, among other beneficiaries, that governments stock and restock their brooks and ponds with fish, while corporations dig canals and maintain reservoirs at great expense to make the most satisfactory of homes for the muskrats. Who shall say men are not kind to the lesser animals!

There are animals, as I am again reminded by the kindly critic looking over my shoulder, that everybody hears about and few see, and perhaps would not recognize when they did. But surely every one would know a 'coon—that comical little rascal, weighing about as much as a house-cat, and, like him, wearing a long, grizzled fur, with the hairs standing out as if blown apart by the breeze, but having the round, fat, loose shape of a well-fed bear. Like a bear, too, it walks on the whole sole of its flat, black-stockinged feet, which brings its body close to the ground, and half the time it is sitting up on its broad stern like a portly squirrel. The long tail is marked by a succession of black rings, and the sharp nose and bright eyes, set in striped fur, give it the cute, intelligent look of a fox.

Raccoons live in holes in trees (where they remain out of sight most of the daylight hours) and are properly arboreal animals, as we know from the veritable story of Colonel Davy Crockett; but at night they come down to raid the farmer's cornfields, and in wilder regions to steal along the banks of woodland streams in search of crabs and mussels, and (by the sea) of oysters. All these things they handle in their fore-paws with the cleverness of a monkey, and, whenever they can, carry them to water and wash them well before eating them.

"It is pleasant," says Rowland Robinson, "to see the tracks of this midnight prowler, this despoiler of cornfields, imprinted in the mud of the lane or along the soft margin of the brook, to know that he survives, though he may not be fittest. When he has gone forever, those who outlive him will know whether it was his quavering note that jarred the still air of the early fall evenings, or if it was only the voice of the owl."

The opossum, too, is a woodland animal, rather less nocturnal than the 'coon, and, like him, fond of fruit and insects and crabs; but he has neither the strength nor cleverness that enable his larger companion to get so varied a fare. He is smaller than the 'coon, about twice as big as a rat, and shaped much like one, which he further resembles in having a long, naked tail. The prolonged, flexible nose and the tail, however, are pinkish white, and the latter has the prehensile quality of some monkeys' and snakes' tails, curling round any support at the tip so firmly that the creature can hang and swing by it, thus giving it a fifth hand. It is a queer, whitey-gray, antique-looking little creature, not only largely nocturnal in its habits, but shy and quick to conceal itself on the farther side of a limb or tree, where its gray color enables it to escape observation.

The muskrat, on the other hand, is a brown, aquatic rat, with a naked, scaly, somewhat flattened tail, adapted to scull him along in swimming and diving, and teeth almost as strong for gnawing as those of his cousin, the beaver. He thrives upon man's bounty, in spite of the fact that he is persecuted and chased by many persons with many motives. To some it is sufficient that he is a wild animal—game—something provided by Providence for boys to stone and shoot; to others his skin has a prospective value; and a third class tries to destroy him because he misuses human hospitality by undermining embankments, boring holes in dams and canal banks, and catching captive fish. Nevertheless, the muskrat maintains his tribe in every part of the country.

He lives in a fine home underground, at the extremity of a hall-way ten, twenty, or even thirty feet long, which opens upon a stream bank usually by two doors, one about the level of low water, and the other near high-water mark. Besides this there is usually an inland opening (for ventilation or escape?) which the musquash, like the woodchuck, has learned to hide within a clump of bush or grass. Here, when the spring begins to grow warm, are born six or seven young, and here they stay until their mother thinks them strong enough to begin to go abroad and to learn to swim, an accomplishment they must be taught in spite of the aquatic habits of the species; but so must a seal, for that matter. This they cannot do until midsummer, when they are half grown. A Western gentleman of my acquaintance tells how once, early in July, at the time of a most unusual flood, he saw a family of muskrats that had been driven from home attempting to reach a place of safety. There was a mother and five kittens, each about the size of a barn-rat, holding by the laboring mother's fur with their teeth in evident fear and distress. She made her way slowly and cautiously along the shore, carefully avoiding obstructions and swift water. A fool of a boy hurled a stone which struck the poor creature and scattered her young, and it was with the utmost difficulty the kittens (who knew nothing of diving) were able to reach the near-by reeds, where they were easily captured. The only person I ever heard of catching a full-grown muskrat in that manner was that wonderful man Thoreau, who makes the following note in his diary under April 8, 1854: "At Nut Meadow Brook I saw, or rather heard, a muskrat plunge into the brook before me, and saw him endeavoring in vain to bury himself in the sandy bottom. Looking like an amphibious animal, I stooped and, taking him by the tail, which projected, tossed him ashore."

That was a trick the sage of Walden seems to have been fond of, for we read that once he served a woodchuck in the same way.

In addition to the snug all-the-year-round home, the muskrat usually makes for himself a winter lodge and storehouse combined. The burrow can be found ordinarily only by searching for it, tracing the subaqueous flight of the owner by the line of bubbles that rise as he speeds towards his shelter, or by falling into it when the roof is thin as you stroll along the bank. But the winter lodges are conspicuous, dotting the frozen marshes like miniature haystacks, sometimes six feet high—a vast heap of doing for a small diameter of being, as Thoreau piously observed. They are composed of whatever grows or lies nearest—sticks, reeds, weeds, grass, etc.—and may be entangled among swamp brush or firmly set upon a foundation carefully cleared of vegetation and loose mud. The interior is usually soft grass, but whether this is arranged as the building proceeds or is put into a chamber hollowed out from beneath after the mass has been heaped up I do not know.

The houses are of various shapes and sizes, and doubt is thrown upon the present sagacity (to say nothing of the alleged foreknowledge) of the architects, when it is known that a large proportion of them are so placed that the first regular late fall rise in the water is sufficient to drown the denizens out and sweep the whole structure away. At any rate, the evidence scarcely justifies measuring muskrat lodges as a means of forecasting winter. It is better to get instruction by observing their structure and uses, and amusement by contemplating them as interesting features of the landscape. "In the still sunny days," to quote again from one of Rowland Robinson's graceful New England essays, "between the nights of its unseen building, the blue spikes of the pickerel weed and the white trinities of the arrow-head yet bloom beside it. Then in the golden and scarlet brightness of autumn the departing wood-drake rests on the roof to preen his plumage, and later the dusky duck swims on its watery lawn. Above it the wild geese harry the low, cold arch of the sky, the last fleet of sere leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind, and then ice and snow draw the veil for the long winter twilight over the muskrat's home and haunts."