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Three of these plump meadow-mice made the traveller a comfortable meal. Forgetting his wrongs, he stretched himself in the full sun under the shelter of a fallen tree, and slept soundly for an hour. Once only he awoke, when his ears caught the beat of a hawk's wings winnowing low over his retreat.
Now, however, coming to a series of wild meadows, he lingered to hunt meadow-mice. Among the roots of the long grass the mice had innumerable hidden runways, through which they could travel without danger from the hawks and owls. Crouching close to one of these runways, the big cat would listen till a squeak or a faint scurrying noise would reveal the passing of a mouse.
On looking more closely it was discovered that other creatures as well as the humming-birds, had been served in a similar manner. Several grasshoppers, spiders, and some coleopterous insects were found, and upon another branch two small meadow-mice had been treated to the same terrible death.
Yet the scattered tracks of mink and musk-rat beside the banks, of meadow-mice around the hay-stacks, of squirrels under the trees, of rabbits and partridges in the wood, show the warm life that is beating unseen, beneath fur or feathers, close beside us.
Rabbits injure trees in the same way, often during the winter ruining an entire orchard in this manner. Squirrels, ground-squirrels, gophers, prairie-dogs, and other small animals do serious damage in the course of a year on almost every farm. The rough-leg hawk feeds entirely on meadow-mice, but if the supply fails, it eats mice, rabbits and ground-squirrels, but in no instance attacks birds.
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.
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