The house of this pair did not fall. How could it when it stood precisely two and a half feet from the ground! But that it wasn’t looted is due to the sheer audacity of its situation. It stood alone, against the road, so close that the hub of a low wheel in passing might have knocked it down. Perhaps a hundred persons had brushed it in going by. How many dogs and cats had overlooked it no one can say, nor how many skunks and snakes and squirrels. The accident that discovered it to me happened apparently to no one else, and I was friendly.
Cutting a tiny window in the bark just above the eggs, I looked in upon the little people every day. I watched them grow and fill the cavity and hang over at the top. I was there the day they forced my window open, the day when there was no more room at the top, and when, at the call of their parents, one after another of this largest and sweetest of bird families found his wings and flew away through the woods.
VI
The Missing Tooth
The snow had melted from the river meadows, leaving them flattened, faded, and stained with mud,—a dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the matted grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still showing, was the narrow path along which the bones had dragged themselves; there the hole by which they had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off a little into the heavy autumn grass and laid them down. The rains had come and the winter snows. The spring was breaking now, and the small bundle, gently loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the wide, bare meadow.
I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton of a muskrat. It was something peculiar in the way they lay that had caused me to pause. They seemed outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the hands of Sleep. They had not been flung down. The delicate ribs had fallen in, but not a bone was broken or displaced, not one showed the splinter of shot, or the crack that might have been made by a steel trap. No violence had been done them. They had been touched by nothing rougher than the snow. Out into the hidden runway they had crept. Death had passed them here; but no one else in all the winter months.