Shoot at him if you will. He is under, unharmed at the flash of your gun, and he may swim a half-mile, if he cares to, before coming up again. Then you may hear him laugh in scornful good humor, “Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo,” for little he cares for you. He knows enough to keep out of your way, but you cannot feel that he is afraid of you. When he goes out again, welting the gale with his strong wings and boring straight into the wild heart of the northeaster, the pond is lonely, the marsh flat and insipid, and it is time for dry clothes and the comfort of glowing logs in the wide fireplace.
THE SQUIRREL HARVEST
THE red squirrel is a good deal like me,—he never can wait for the chestnuts to open. As long ago as early September I used to see him going up and down the trunks of trees neighboring the chestnuts, sputtering and exploding his way along in a jerky unrhythm. He would go up the trunk as a light-weight, motor-skipping runabout goes up a steep hill, trembling all over as he fizzed along with barking explosions.
He had his eye on the closed burs, densely set with green spines, and he was angry because he was liable to get his tongue pierced in getting them open. But it did not matter. The milk-white pulp in the brown shells was too tempting. All this last month he has been going to the very tips of the limbs of the highest trees, clinging there as only a red squirrel can, and gnawing the burs loose. When a sufficient number of these were strewn on the ground beneath he would motor down there, and with the piston still chugging occasionally, just to prove to himself that he could start his car at a second’s notice, cut expeditiously through the defiant prickles and smack his wounded lips over the kernels within.
Meanwhile, in common with most of the boys in town, I, too, have been having my troubles with the chestnut burs. A boy understands that the red squirrel gets the burs after the fashion of the real sport, and so far as he can he is willing to do the same. But the smaller limbs of the chestnut are brittle, and under the best of circumstances it is a
The red squirrel gets the burs after the fashion of the real sport