Toward morning Hoot-Mon got up and tried to dance, but fell over and went to sleep instead. I fixed him up a bed on the floor and lifted him over on to it. There he stayed, snoring loudly, until the middle of the afternoon. Then he awoke, sighed heavily, yawned, and rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“Well, Hoot-Mon,” I asked, “do you feel better?”
He came to me, sat down on the table in front of me, and nodded, with something very like a smile upon his face. It could not rightly be characterised as an exact smile, because he was too preternaturally solemn.
I fed him, then opened the door. “Do you want to go now?” I inquired. With a scream of dismay, he flew back into the darkest corner of the cabin and refused to budge. I understood then. He had made up his mind to live with me.
The next day, he found my watch and took it out from under my pillow. He seemed greatly interested in the mechanism and held it to his ear that he might hear it tick. I did not especially mind, for the wild animals had always taken up my time, more or less, but I hid my jewelled repeater and gave him the alarm clock, which did just as well. In time he learned to set the alarm and would laugh like a Parrot when I jumped out of my chair at the unexpected report.
All that Winter, Hoot-Mon and I lived together. Often he got hungry for his own kind of food, and at such times I would put on some red flannel stockings I had made for him, without feet, a red flannel shawl, pinned closely at the throat, and a face mask, also of red flannel, with openings for the eyes and beak and those wonderful ears of which I have spoken before.
He got so that whenever he wished to go hunting, he would search out these articles from the corner of the cabin where they were kept,—never forgetting the safety-pin that fastened the shawl,—bring them to me, and stand very still while I put them on.
He usually had conspicuous success upon these hunting trips. He would come back with three or four beach Rats, two Rabbits, the body of a belated Squirrel who had not yet gone south, and more Weasels and Muskrats that a person could count without more knowledge of arithmetic than I had. Hoot-Mon would skin all of these animals, preferably doing the work in the house, and then he would store them in a natural cave of ice just beyond the wood-pile.
He gave the skins to me, and I made a quilt of them for my cot. He usually ate his own food raw, but once he dropped a Muskrat into the pot in which I was making an Irish stew, and laughed loud and long at my language when I took it out.
He had many mischievous tricks and would often hide my pens, tip over my ink and track it all over the fair, smooth pages of my observation ledger. At other times, he made himself very useful to me, especially on sweeping day. Strutting around gravely on one leg, Hoot-Mon would sweep the floor first with one great wing and then with the other, pushing the dirt always toward the door. When he had it all in a neat pile and the corners were perfectly clean, he would make a signal to me. I would open the door, and with a great, forward sweep of both wings, Hoot-Mon would brush all the dirt outside, meanwhile saying something that sounded like “shoo!” It was clever of him, but it wearied him greatly and he would always take a long nap afterward, though he never slept on my bed. I was very grateful to him because he was willing to sleep in his own corner, remembering a previous unhappy experience.