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If direct observation is impracticable, we can at least foresee the main outlines of the drama by allowing ourselves to be guided by the warlike manoeuvres of other burrowers. Cf. "The Hunting Wasps": chapters 18 to 20. Forthwith, the assaulted victim, contracting desperately, rolls itself into a ball. The other seizes it by the skin of the neck.
Bears and wolves were closing in from all directions, and now from the sky the Thunder gave his fearful war-whoop, answered by the wolf's long howl. The badgers and other burrowers began at once to undermine his rocky fortress, while the climbers undertook to scale its perpendicular walls.
About the time the burrowers and all that feed upon them are addressing themselves to sleep, great flocks pour down the trails with that peculiar melting motion of moving quail, twittering, shoving, and shouldering.
With regard to the shrew-mice and moles, there is less reason for separating them from other mice; and we shall speak of them in this connection. The Moles are known to be the best burrowers in the world: since they can pass under the surface of the ground as fast as a man can dig after them, or even faster.
There they had made a pact with a winged people living in the huge buildings of a jungle-choked city. "But you see" the Polynesian girl turned to Ashe when Ross had finished "you did find them these ape-things and the winged people. But here there are only the dragons and the burrowers. Are they the start or the finish? I want to know " "Why?" Ashe asked.
The traps are sometimes inserted in the burrows from the hillocks, by first finding the hole and then enlarging it by inserting the arm and digging with the hand beneath. The former method, however, is preferable. Of all the mammalia the Mole is entitled to take the first place in the list of burrowers.
These creatures are among the finest burrowers in the world, and can bury themselves in the earth in a few seconds' time; but, being badly toothed, some of them altogether without teeth, they can only feed upon very soft substances.
It was not a very usual thing with them, and they hastened to act upon it lest it should get away. They proceeded to block up their entrance tunnel about three feet from the door. They packed the earth hard, and made a good job of it, and flattered themselves that their guests would not get in in a hurry, even if they were pretty good burrowers themselves.
Only when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long clean flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most one sees of the burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their newly opened doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs on spiny shrubs.
The Tachytes, the Bembeces, the Stizi, the Palari and other burrowers build composite cocoons, hard as fruit-stones, formed of an encrustation of sand in a network of silk. We are already acquainted with the work of the Bembex.
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