You would say that this animal hardly looks like a weasel at all, for it is very heavily and clumsily built, and, including the tail, is often as much as four feet long. If you did not know what it was, you might almost take it for a bear cub with a tail. It is blackish brown in color, with a lighter band which runs from the shoulders along the sides and across the flanks, as far as the root of the tail.
"Glutton" is rather an odd name for this creature, isn't it? But certainly the animal deserves it, for it will go on eating and eating, long after you would think that it could not possibly swallow a morsel more. Indeed, a glutton has been known to devour, at a single meal, a great joint of meat, which would have been more than sufficient for a lion or a tiger for a whole day! It lives in North America, and also in Northern Europe and Northern Asia, and the hunters find it a terrible nuisance, for night after night it will search along a line of traps and devour all the animals caught in them. Then, too, if they bury a quantity of provisions in the ground, meaning to come back and fetch them later on, a glutton is very likely to discover them and dig them up, while the animal is also fond of visiting their huts while they are absent, and stealing everything it can carry away.
Blankets, knives, axes, and even saucepans and frying-pans have been stolen in this way by gluttons, and once one of these animals actually succeeded in dragging away and hiding a gun! It is even a worse robber, in fact, than the arctic fox. And it can hardly ever be trapped, because it is so crafty that it almost always discovers the traps, and either passes them by or pulls them to pieces, while it is so wary, and so swift of foot, that the hunter very seldom has a chance of shooting it.
It was formerly supposed that this animal was even more crafty still, and that it would collect a quantity of the moss of which deer are so fond, lay it upon the ground as a bait, and hide in the foliage of an overhanging bough, so as to spring down upon the animals when they stopped to feed. But this story seems to be quite untrue.
The Ratel
More curious still is the ratel, which belongs to the family of badgers. You cannot possibly mistake it if you see it, for all the upper part of its body is grayish white, and all the lower part is black. So that it looks rather like a lady wearing a white mantle and a black skirt.
But if the ratel is odd in appearance, it is odder still in habits. If you go to look at them in a zoo you are sure to find them trotting leisurely round and round their cage in a perfect circle, one behind the other. And when they come to a certain spot they always stop, turn head over heels, pick themselves up, and then run on again. Why they do so nobody knows, but for hours every day they keep up this singular performance.
The ratel is very fond of honey, so fond that it is often called the honey-ratel, or honey-weasel, and it spends a good deal of time in prowling about in search of the nests of wild bees. You would think that it would get badly stung by the bees, wouldn't you, when it tore their nests open and robbed them of their sweet stores? But its coat is so thick that the insects can scarcely force their stings through it, while even if they do so there is a thick loose skin under it, and a layer of fat under that. So it seems quite certain that a ratel never gets stung, no matter how many nests he may rob.
The animal does not live entirely on honey, however, but also feeds upon rats, mice, small birds, lizards, and even insects.
Two kinds of ratels are known, one of which lives in Africa and the other in India.