"MUS'RATTIN'"
One November afternoon I found Uncle Jethro back of the woodshed, drawing a chalk-mark along the barrel of his old musket, from the hammer to the sight.
"What are you doing that for, Uncle Jeth?" I asked.
"What fo'? Fo' mus'rats, boy."
"Muskrats! Do you think they'll walk up and toe that mark, while you knock 'em over with a stick?"
"G'way fum yhere! What I take yo' possumin' des dozen winters fo', en yo' dunno how to sight a gun in de moon yit? I's gwine mus'rattin' by de moon to-night, en I won't take yo' nohow."
Of course he took me. We went out about nine o'clock, and entering the zigzag lane behind the barn, followed the cow-paths down to the pasture, then cut across the fields to Lupton's Pond, the little wood-walled lake which falls over a dam into the wide meadows along Cohansey Creek.
It is a wild, secluded spot, so removed that a pair of black ducks built their nest for several springs in the deep moss about the upper shore.
It is shallow and deeply crusted over with lily-pads and pickerel-weed, except for a small area about the dam, where the water is deep and clear. There are many stumps in the upper end; and here, in the shallows, built upon the hummocks or anchored to the submerged roots, are the muskrats' houses.
The big moon was rising over the meadows as we tucked ourselves snugly out of sight in a clump of small cedars on the bank, within easy range of the dam and commanding a view of the whole pond. The domed houses of the muskrats—the village numbered six homes—showed plainly as the moon came up; and when the full flood of light fell on the still surface of the pond, we could see the "roads" of the muskrats, like narrow channels, leading down through the pads to the open space about the dam.