MARSH RABBIT
Sylvilagus palustris
PIKA, LITTLE CHIEF HARE, or CONY
Ochotona princeps
They feed upon a great variety of seeds, fruits, roots, and succulent vegetable matter and lay up stores for winter in underground chambers or in hollow logs and similar places above ground.
With the coming of winter they gather about cabins and other habitations in their territory and become as persistent as house mice in searching out and raiding food supplies of all kinds. When the more appreciated kinds of food fail they resort to gnawing the bark from roots and bases of trunks of small deciduous trees of various kinds.
During my sledge journeys in the region about Bering Strait I found the skins of many red-backed mice among the Eskimo children. The small boys kept them with lemming skins as evidences of their prowess with miniature dead-fall traps and blunt-pointed arrows, and the little girls kept them as prized robes for the dolls carved by their fathers from wood or walrus ivory.
THE RUFOUS TREE MOUSE (Phenacomys longicaudus and its relatives)
(For illustration, [see page 523])