Our six-footed brothers are wonderfully strong in proportion to their size, and it would go hard with us if beetles, for example, were as big as boys.
Do you know what I felt like saying, back there in [Chapter IX], when we were speaking of kingfishers, and how certain parties had given it out that kingfishers eat big fish that otherwise might be caught with a hook or a seine? This is what I felt like saying:
"What if they do? Who's got a better right?"
Then they'd say—these men—I suppose:
"Why, we have; we're sportsmen!"
"Oh, yes," I'd say, "you're the kind of sportsman that's so afraid somebody else will see and kill something before you do; particularly if that somebody is itself a wild creature that has to earn its living that way and only takes what it needs for its family!"
And they're so good-natured about it, most of these country cousins of ours, that we walked right in on and ordered out, Cousin Woodchuck, for instance.
"The woodchuck can no more see the propriety of fencing off—though he admits that stone walls are fine refuges, in case he has to run for it—a space of the very best fodder than the British peasant can see the right of shutting him out of a grove where there are wild rabbits, or forbidding him to fish in certain streams. So he climbs over, or digs under, or creeps through, the fence, and makes a path or a playground for himself amid the timothy and the clover, and laughs, as he listens from a hole in the wall or under a stump, to hear the farmer using language which is good Saxon but bad morals, and the dog barking himself into a fit."[29]
II. The School of the Woods and Fields
I don't mean to say, mind you, that the farmer hasn't any rights in his own fields, and that he should turn everything over to the woodchuck and the rest, but I do mean to say that our wild kinsmen have rights and that there is a lot more to be got out of them than their flesh or their hides or the pleasure of killing them.