CHAPTER VIII
TO THE TEACHER
This chapter and the next (chapter IX) should be taken together as a single study of the provision of nature against the severity of winter’s cold, chapter VIII being a detailed account of one creature’s preparations, while chapter IX follows, showing how the foresight and care obtain even among the plants and trees. The two chapters together should give the pupils a glad thought for winter, should utterly change their conventional language and feeling for it as a time of death. And instead of lamenting the season as a necessary evil, you must show them that it is to be welcomed as a period of sleep for nature from which she will waken in all the freshness of a springtime such as is nowhere to be had outside of the temperate zone. “It is not always May,” wails the poet; but ask them: Who wants it always May? We want the variety, the contrasts of our four seasons, and as to winter, let the North Wind blow at will, redden our cheeks, quicken our step, put purpose into our wills and—it won’t starve us; for we, too, like the muskrat, are provided for.
FOR THE PUPIL
If there is a muskrat house or village of houses in your neighborhood, report to the class, or better, take teacher and class, as soon as freezing weather comes, to see it. Go out yourselves and try to see the muskrats plastering their walls on one of the bright October nights.
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muskrats combine: The author has frequently found as many as six rats in a single house; but whether all of these helped in the building or not, he is unable to say.
winter house: If the house is undisturbed (as when situated out in a stumpy pond) it will stand for years, the rats dwelling in it the year around.
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pick and shovel: What is meant by a fox’s “pick and shovel”?
Lupton’s Pond: the name of a little wood-walled pond that the author haunted as a boy.
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley.”
Learn this poem (“To A Mouse”) by heart. Burns is the author.
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very much alike: Name some other respects in which animals and men are alike in their lives. What famous line in the poem just quoted is it that makes men and mice very closely related?
bottom of the house: Down in the very foundation walls of the muskrat’s house are two runways or “doors” that open under water and so far under that they rarely if ever freeze. See picture of such a house with its door in the author’s “Wild Life Near Home,” page 174.
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tepee: What is a tepee?
juicy and pink and tender: The muskrats eat grass stems and roots, so that under the water near the lodge you will often find in winter little stacks of these tender pink stems and roots ready for eating—much as the beaver stores up sticks of tender bark under the water near his lodge for food when the ice forms overhead.
Winter is coming: Are you glad or sorry? Are you ready?