While this robust and uncultured family of flickers were growing up, only three doors away (counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered family of four, were living in a hole so near the ground that I could look in upon the meek but brave little mother.
There is still another dead-tree crop that the average bird-lover and summer naturalist rarely gathers—I mean the white-footed mice. They are the jolliest little beasts in all the tree hollows. It is when the woods are bare and deep with snow, when the cold, dead winter makes outside living impossible, that one really appreciates the coziness and protection of the life in these deep rooms, sunk like wells into the hearts of the trees. With what unconcern the mice await nightfall and the coming of the storms! They can know nothing of the anxiety and dread of the crows; they can share little of the crows' suffering in the bitter nights of winter. A warm, safe bed is a large item in out-of-doors living when it is cold; and I have seen where these mice tuck themselves away from the dark and storm in beds so snug and warm that I wished to be an elf myself, with white feet and a long tail, to creep in with them.
I had some wood-choppers near the house on the lookout for mice, but, though they often marked the stumps where they had cut into nests, the winter nearly passed before I secured a single white-foot. Coming up from the pond one day with a clerical friend, after a vain attempt to skate, we lost our way in the knee-deep snow, and while floundering about happened upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It was as stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, apparently, as ever went to dust. The limbs were broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and stuck out like stumps of arms; the top had been drilled through and through by woodpeckers, and now lay several feet away, buried in the snow; and the hole, like the limbs, was without a shred of bark, but covered instead with a thin coating of slime. This slime was marked with fine scratches, as would be made by the nails of very small animals. I almost rudely interrupted my learned friend's discussion of the documentary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation that there were mice in the old corpse. The Hebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then he stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? But I was dropping off my overcoat and ordering him away to borrow the ax of a man we heard chopping. He looked utterly undone, but thought it best to humor me, though I know he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then, and would infinitely rather have substituted his skates. I insisted, however, and he disappeared for the ax.
The snow was deep, the pine was punky and would easily fall; and now was the chance to get my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up to the woodpecker holes since the last storm.
The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came his coat. He was as eager now as though this tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He was anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense—a kind of X-ray organ that saw mice at the centers of trees. And, priest though he was (shame on the human animal!), he had grown excited at the prospect of the chase of—mice!
I tramped away the snow about the tree. The ax was swinging swiftly through the air; the preacher was repeating between strokes: "I'm—truly—sorry—man's—dominion—has—" when suddenly there was a crunch, a crash, and the axman leaped aside with the yell of a fiend; for, as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed creatures were dashed into the soft snow. "The prettiest thing I ever saw," he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only mouse captured.
We traced the chambers up and down the tree as they wound, stairway-like, just inside the hard outer shell. Here and there we came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded bark—a complete fortress against the siege of winter.
That pine had not borne a green needle for a decade. It was too long dead and too much decayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there was not a livelier, more interesting tree in the region that winter, nor one half so full of goings on, as this same old shell of a pine, with scarcely heart enough to stand.