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Each pellet was long, brown, dry, and curved, i.e., the winter type. The place, a high, dry, very sheltered hollow, was evidently the winter range of a colony of Lemmings that in summer went elsewhere, I suppose to lower, damper grounds.
The Lemmings are another form of small rodent animals, celebrated for their extraordinary migratory habit; which resembles that of the grey squirrels of North America. There are several species of lemmings belonging to the northern section of the Old Continent in Eastern Russia and Asia. One or two are found in North America in that part of it known as the Hudson's Bay Territory.
The blue lakes echo with the wailing of the Gulls and the eerie magic calling of the Loons. Colonies of Lemmings, Voles, or Groundsquirrels are found on every sunny slope; the Wolverine and the White Wolf find this a land of plenty, for on every side, as I stood on that high hill, were to be seen small groups of Caribou. This was the land and these the creatures I had come to see.
The farmers try to destroy them, but they soon give up the attempt, as for days and days the lemmings come on in great waves, eating up the grass and the crops wherever they pass. Except the sea, nothing will stop them when once they have made a start; they come down the mountain-sides, swim the rivers and streams, rush through the forests, and, eating as they go, devastate the farm-lands.
My home is in Arctic regions, where my feather-lined nest rests on the ground, and even in winter I come into the United States only when driven by snowstorms from the North. "At home I live chiefly on lemmings, which are a sort of clumsy, short-tailed field-mice, not good for anything but to be eaten.
The herbage, sparse though it be, does not grow in vain. The seeds fall to the earth, but they are not suffered to decay. They are gathered by the little lemmings and meadow-mice, who, in their turn, become the prey of two species of mustelidæ, the ermine and vison weasels. Have the fish of the lakes no enemy? Yes a terrible one in the Canada otter.
He looked just like Thunder, the big white rabbit, only his ears were short, his coat was yellow, and he was ever so much smaller. Little White Fox knew who he was right away, for he had heard his mother speak of the Lemming family. And this was one of the Lemmings! There could be no doubt of it. And the Lemmings are great fighters, if they happen to be in the mood for it.
The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and coöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part without scheme or direction. This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula.
If anything could make ME uneasy it wouldn't be THAT. 'What would it be? asked Jane kindly. 'It would be the Lemmings. 'Who are they enemies? 'They're a sort of rat; and every year they come swimming over from the country that no man knows, and stay here awhile, and then swim away. This year they haven't come. You know rats won't stay on a ship that's going to be wrecked.
Necessity is laid upon the peoples, and they move, like the lemmings of Scandinavia; but to man, being not without understanding like the beasts that perish, it is permitted to ask, "Whither?" and "What shall be the end hereof?" Does this tend to universal peace, general disarmament, and treaties of permanent arbitration?
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