V
A FRIGHTENED MINK
In walking through the woods one day in early winter, we read upon the newly fallen snow the record of a mink's fright the night before. The mink had been traveling through the woods post-haste, not along the watercourses where one sees them by day, but over ridges and across valleys. We followed his track some distance to see what adventures he had met with. We tracked him through a bushy swamp, saw where he had left it to explore a pile of rocks, then where he had taken to the swamp again, then to the more open woods. Presently the track turned sharply about, and doubled upon itself in long hurried strides. What had caused the mink to change its mind so suddenly? We explored a few paces ahead, and came upon a fox track. The mink
had seen the fox stalking stealthily through the woods, and the sight had probably brought his heart into his mouth. I think he climbed a tree, and waited till the fox passed. His track disappeared amid a clump of hemlocks, and then reappeared again a little beyond them. It described a big loop around, and then crossed the fox track only a few yards from the point where its course was interrupted. Then it followed a little watercourse, went under a rude bridge in a wood-road, then mingled with squirrel tracks in a denser part of the thicket. If the mink met a muskrat or a rabbit in his travels, or came upon a grouse, or quail, or a farmer's hen-roost, he had the supper he was in quest of.
VI
A LEGLESS CLIMBER
The eye always sees what it wants to see, and the ear hears what it wants to hear. If I am intent upon birds'-nests in my walk, I find birds'-nests everywhere. Some people see four-leaved clovers wherever they look in the grass. A friend of mine picks up Indian relics all about the fields; he has Indian relics in his eye. I have seen him turn out of the path at right angles, as a dog will when he scents something, and walk straight away several rods, and pick up an Indian pounding-stone. He saw it out of the corner of his eye. I find that without conscious effort I see and hear birds with like ease. Eye and ear are always on the alert.
One day in early June I was walking with some
friends along a secluded wood-road. Above the hum of the conversation I caught the distressed cry of a pair of blue jays. My companions heard it also, but did not heed it.
But to my ear the cry was peculiar. It was uttered in a tone of anguish and alarm. I said, "Let us see what is the trouble with these jays." I presently saw a nest twenty-five or thirty feet from the ground in a small hemlock which I at once concluded belonged to the jays. The birds were but a few yards away, hopping about amid the neighboring branches, uttering now and then their despairing note. Looking more intently at the nest, I became aware in the dim light of the tree of something looped about it, or else there was a dark, very crooked limb that partly held it. Suspecting the true nature of the case, I threw a stone up through the branches, and then another and another, when the dark loops and folds upon one side of the nest began to disappear, and the head and neck of a black snake to slowly slide out on a horizontal branch on the other; in a moment the snake had cleared the nest, and stretched himself along the branch.
Another rock-fragment jarred his perch, when he slid cautiously along toward the branch of a large pine-tree which came out and mingled its spray with that of the hemlock. It was soon apparent that the snake was going to take refuge in the pine. As he made the passage from one tree to the other, we sought to dislodge him by a shower of sticks and stones, but without success; he was soon upon a
large branch of the pine, and, stretched out on top of the limb, thought himself quite hidden. And so he was; but we knew his hiding-place, and the stones and clubs we hurled soon made him uneasy. Presently a club struck the branch with such force that he was fairly dislodged, but saved himself by quickly wrapping his tail about the limb. In this position he hung for some moments, but the intervening branches shielded him pretty well from our missiles, and he soon recovered himself and gained a still higher branch that reached out over the road and nearly made a bridge to the trees on the other side.