In the open

by Stanton Davis Kirkham

No one has explained why the woodchuck holes up so early in the autumn and comes out at such an unseasonable time in the spring. He goes in while there is still plenty to eat, and reappears when there is scarcely anything to be had. Possibly the habit was acquired in some remote past when the winter may have come earlier in the year, and the woodchucks, being a conservative race and loath to change their ways, have never adapted themselves, but go to bed now as it were in the middle of the afternoon and get up before daybreak, impelled to this early rising by hunger. Soon we shall be walking over his head, but it will not disturb his nap. He will have rolled himself up in a ball for a four or five months' snooze in company with all the little frogs and snakes—a sleepy crowd. The chipmunk is likewise a chilly body, but he is not going to fast—not he—so he lays in a good store of chestnuts and makes all snug for the cold weather.

While the moral of the ant and the grasshopper will doubtless always hold good, there is little incentive for the grasshopper to become thrifty as few would live to enjoy the results. But the woodchuck might well profit by the example of the chipmunk, who loves his comfort and a well-stocked larder in which to snooze away the winter months, a round of dinners and after-dinner naps. Besides his hordes of beech and chestnuts, he is credited with gathering the seeds of the buttercup as well as buckwheat and grass seed. I have seen him on the tips of witch-hazel twigs biting off the nutlets of the preceding year. He has some variety at his table then. The buttercups must be in the nature of a delicacy—his sweetcakes perhaps.

As the weather grows colder the vegetation seems to droop hourly, the bare earth becoming visible, except where the dry leaves have roofed themselves over the huckleberry bushes or in the thick tangle of briers. The rabbit must feel himself rather too much in evidence as the ground is thus exposed, and perforce relies more on his protective coloration to escape notice. An adept at dissimulation, he turns into a stump and remains so indefinitely. Yet looking at him recently, as he sat motionless on some dry leaves among the bare stems of the blackcap raspberries, I was struck with how poor a refuge his colors really do afford when once your eye is upon him. At the first glance, and before he had come into the mental vision as a rabbit, he appeared as a small grayish stump covered with buff-tinted shelf fungi. But the moment I looked sharply at him, he was a rabbit in every detail. His colors did not greatly harmonize with the oak leaves on which he sat, yet he allowed me to approach and walk around him. It is all a matter of the attention; by remaining quiet the animal does not arrest the eye readily, but once this is directed upon him the disguise is seen to be very thin.

Save for his nose, which wobbled slightly, he was motionless as a stone. After some time his ear moved gently, much as a leaf is turned over by the wind, but his eye never winked and its expression was one of extreme alertness. On too near an approach he made off in haste. Noting his direction, I followed to see if I could again locate him. For some time no rabbit was visible, when I chanced again upon a little gray stump covered with buff-tinted fungi, which appeared this time on the pine-needles and just within the charmed precincts of the briers.

I produced an apple as a peace offering and in token of my good-will and desire to be of service to the tribe of gray rabbits. He remained like a stone while the bits of apple descended about him and lay at a tempting distance. At last there was a more vigorous wobbling of the nose, the long ears moved—as a leaf turns—and with two little hops he approached and accepted the token, and we were brought together in amity in the silent woods. A humble offering, indeed, but it served for the moment to bring me in touch with the wild and to strike a common chord. The seemingly impassable barrier of caste, which lies between man and the wild things, was crossed, and we broke bread together.

After a light fall of snow it is instructive to read what the rabbit has written in his diary. Such scattered notes as he leaves are wholly personal and do not seem to imply interest in anything but himself. You may see where he has hopped through his runways and stopped now and then when the necessity appealed to him of removing certain briers to keep the passageway clear. Sometimes it is a stem of the catbrier; again a rose or blackberry. In every case it is cut obliquely and as sharply and neatly as with a knife. Frequently stems are severed thickly set with thorns and prickers, and the wonder is how he closed his teeth upon them without getting an unpleasant mouthful. Hundreds of cuts reveal never a slip or break, but each is sharply defined as if done by one stroke of a razor. His track shows places where he sat upon his haunches, and where he stood up to reach the buds of a stunted wild apple; again he followed the shore of the pond and nibbled the small willows and clethra. Occasionally he appears to have cut a large brier merely for practice in using his teeth.

Rabbit and fox are outlaws and without rights. They are hunted to death; hence they live by their wits if they live at all. It has become second nature to them to proceed indirectly, to break the scent and double on their tracks whenever occasion offers. The fox knows few foes besides men and dogs, but the rabbit must circumvent owls, weasels, minks and foxes as well. Hence I bow to the rabbit as to a superior intelligence: one deeply versed in the ancient lore of woodcraft and possessing knowledge as yet unrevealed to us. Does he carry some charm whereby the earth opens and receives him in need, some tarn hut in which he becomes invisible, or does the fabled St.-John's-wort exercise for his race a special protection? What shall fill the place of the wild things when they are swept from the earth? Why not tolerate an occasional fox if only to hear him yap, and to have the assurance that there is still this much untamed?

In such a timid world, where fear of man is so large a factor, one is struck by the least evidence of self-assurance. In view of this I entertain a covert admiration for the skunk. Fear rests lightly on his shoulders. Meet him in the woods, teetering along, and he is the less concerned of the two. His imperturbability is his leading characteristic. In this he is the very opposite of the coon. But he knows how terrible is the weapon he carries, how vulnerable the nose of man. The nose is the point of attack; he would slay you through your olfactories. It is seldom any one says a good word for the skunk. He must needs be a villain and a chicken thief who smells thus to heaven. Yet in fact there are bolder thieves in town than he, with more sinister designs on the hen-roost. It is impolite to mention him, as though his name were as unsavory as his odor. Men deal more kindly with his memory, for he is permitted to undergo a commercial transfiguration, to rise triumphant from the vat, henceforth to be taken to our bosoms as Alaska sable.

The skunk receives no credit for the countless beetles he grubs from the earth. No more does the mole who suffers for the sins of the meadow-mouse. They are victims of prejudice. When I see a mole emerge from the earth, I feel I am looking upon an inhabitant of another sphere—the underworld; one as strange to me as I am to him. What use has he for the sun? He cares not for celestial light, but for subterranean fires only.

In the pond above the glen is a colony of muskrats. It antedates the memory of the oldest inhabitants, and the muskrats were in all probability the first settlers themselves. The huts, which lie scattered through the sedge and cattails, are some of them flat while others are high and dome-shaped. Their number does not seem to vary much from year to year, whereas muskrats are said to be very prolific. What, then, becomes of all the young? I have never known of any one trapping or killing them in this pond. It may be the old mink in the glen, and many another, make this their hunting-ground and thus keep down the number.