No doubt the squirrel takes a pleasure in its capricious flirtations with danger, but certain it is that it would lose very little fun and no food at all if it were always friendly; while the joy and excitement—I am sure excitement is the word—of the lords of creation and their families who visit the Zoo would be enormously greater.
Moving on, I was conscious, for the first time, of the Prairie Marmot.
Countless are the times that I have passed the enclosure which, though the Prairie Marmot shares it with the grey squirrel, its North American compatriot, really belongs to neither of them, but to pigeons and sparrows. No doubt you know this enclosure; it has on one side of it the aquarium where the diving-birds pursue their live prey with such merciless zest and punctuality every day at 12 and 5, and on the other is the sculptured group of the giant negro in conflict with the angry mother of cubs.
Coming unconsciously upon this enclosure, I was suddenly aware of the oddest statuette. Pigeons, squirrels, and sparrows were moving restlessly about in the eternal quest for food, and in their midst, obviously made of stone, although coloured to resemble fur, was the rigid effigy, some ten inches high, of as comic a creature as a human artist ever designed. There this figure stood, without a flicker. And then, a small girl with a bag approaching the railings, he came to life in a flash, the perpendicular suddenly gave way to the horizontal, and he trotted down to meet her much as any other rodent would do.
The Prairie Marmot is a rat-like creature, but blunter, stockier, twice as big, and light brown in colour. The learned, of course, after their wont, know him by a lengthier and more imposing name. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, for example, who controls the Zoo so ably and with such imagination, would never say Prairie Marmot on those occasions when he has questions to ask as to its well-being in captivity. Nothing so commonplace. "And, by the way," he would add, having been satisfied as to the good health of the elephants and the water-beetles, the avadavats and the hartebeests,—"and, by the way, how is the Cynomys Ludovicianus? Does he seem to thrive? Does he prosper and multiply, or is the competition of the Columba Londiniensis" (meaning the Metropolitan pigeon) "too much for him?" But, whatever you call him, the Prairie Marmot remains a most ingratiating creature, and when you see him with his two tiny hands holding a monkey-nut and consuming it with eager bites you feel that it must have been for him that the well-worn phrase, "to sit up and take nourishment," was coined.
In the unimportant intervals between these two actions—this vertical eating and the sudden transformation of himself into stone, which is his greatest gift and which he does so often that he has worn his poor tail into a threadbare stump—the Prairie Marmot is of no particular interest. He just creeps about or disappears into his crater in the bank. But as his own statue—so perfect as not only to be the despair but the bankruptcy of sculptors—he is terrific. And the change is so swift. One moment he is on all fours, and the next he is a rock, as though a magician had waved his wand.
Henceforth no visit to the Zoo will be, to me, complete without a few minutes' contemplation of the Cynomys Ludovicianus in his quick-change turn.