If he wants something a little more spicy there are spots in the bog, now safe under water and ice but within easy reach of a submarine like himself, where grow the pungent roots of the calamus, the sweet flag, of which he is very fond and which, when dried and sugared, most humans like to nibble. Stored all along the shallows are his shell-fish, the fresh water mussels whose thin shells he can easily tear open and whose white flesh he finds exceedingly toothsome. These, too, are as available in winter as in summer. Indeed some of his houses are built in the autumn, not so much for winter homes as restaurants where he may dine in seclusion on these very mollusks. Quite a distance from the bog, over in a shallow part of the pond, is a bed of these mussels with a flat-topped rock near by rising above the surface. Here last fall the muskrats built a lodge, right on the rock, which they used for this purpose. The first skaters kicked this lodge to pieces. It was fairly crammed with the empty shells of many a rare feast, showing that here Mussascus had undoubtedly entertained his friends in true Bohemian style.
So, while I shivered in the searching east wind on the sky side of the ice, the muskrats were well fed and comfortable in a region of even higher temperature, a country where the spring, which we say comes up out of the south, but the muskrat knows wells up out of the ground beneath, is already at his door. Its warmth is in the bog below and has softened and even melted the ice all about the tepees. The ice on the pond is a foot thick still, but the water beneath it is thrilled with this same potency and you have but to stir it to sniff its fragrance. Below the pond the brook which is its outlet splashes over the long-abandoned sills of what was a gristmill dam in the days of the early settlers. Here in spite of the keen lances of the wind and its roar in the frozen maples overhead, I heard the soft tones of the coming season in every babble of the brook. All the air was full of a fresh, inviting fragrance which the water gives off as it flows. All the pond is full of it beneath the ice already, and the muskrat breathes it in his every excursion under the crystal depths. Soon he will abandon the winter houses, which as soon as the frost leaves them will sag and flatten and begin to sink into the bog itself, building its outer edge a little firmer here and there, and thus helping it in its yearly encroachment on the pond itself. As the ages have gone by, Mussascus has been a pretty potent factor in this encroachment.
As the beaver has been a maker of ponds and a conserver of streams, holding and delaying their waters with his dams, so the muskrat has helped in the making of meadows and the sanding and grading of pond edges. The first is done by his winter nests, the second by his summer burrows which start under water at the pond edge and slant along near the surface for thirty to fifty feet. Many cubic yards of sand and loam are dug from these burrows and spread along in the shallows. His river habits are strong upon him in this work, for he usually makes a delta of entrances, three or four leading up into the same passage which often has a wee exit above water, near the edge. Here if you are particularly fortunate you may in midsummer see his young poke their noses up, longing for a peek at the great world, before they are big enough to swim out into it. Here, too, weasel and mink sometimes find entrance and devour his family. But there are three litters a year, as a rule, so the occasional weasel serves to keep down a too great increase in the population.
His greatest enemy, however, is man, who so pollutes the streams with sewage and factory refuse that no self-respecting muskrat can live in many of them, and who hunts him for his fur for the making of automobile coats. Yet in the case of my Ponkapoag Pond friends man’s hand for once is for him rather than against. His home there is now a part of the park system and he may be shot or trapped only under penalty of the law. This has been so for some years now and I think it explains the numbers of the winter lodges which are this year greater than ever before.
THICK ICE
IN the winter the pond finds a voice. The great sheet of foot-thick, white ice is like a gigantic disk in a telephone, receiver and transmitter in one, sending and receiving messages between the earth and space. Probably these messages pass equally in summer, only the instruments are so tuned then that our finite ears may not perceive them; for the surface of the pond has its water disk in the summer no less than in winter, but an exquisitely thinner and finer one.