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He had almost expected that some of the local clergy would have insisted on being present, or that a salute might have to be fired over the grave. And thus it came to pass that in the dusk of a November evening the Russian boy, murmuring a few of the prayers of his Church for luck, gave hasty but decent burial to a large polecat under the lilac trees at Hoopington. Mrs.
The writer recently saw the skin of a cat which had reverted to the exact size, colouring, and length of fur of the wild species, killed in the well-known Bagley Wood, an area of similar character, but of much greater extent, at a few miles distance in the direction of Oxford. A polecat was domiciled in Wittenham Wood as lately as August, 1898.
Like a thin, wavy line through the night, friend polecat betook himself to the sea-bank, to a hole in the sea-bank, to the very depths of that hole; and there, in the shape of two angrily smoldering, luminous orbs shining steadily through the pit-like dark, he stayed. Most of the time, I fancy, he used up in licking his wounds.
The deer are a picture only a picture that lives and moves and is beautiful to look at, but must not be rudely handled. Still, they linger while the marten has disappeared, the polecat is practically gone, and the badger becoming rare. It is curious that the badger has lived on through sufferance for three centuries.
I might here intreat largely of other vermin, as the polecat, the miniver, the weasel, stote, fulmart, squirrel, fitchew, and such like, which Cardan includeth under the word Mustela: also of the otter, and likewise of the beaver, whose hinder feet and tail only are supposed to be fish.
The old male polecat seemed to, anyway, for just as the first flicker of dawn was paling the eastern sky he went off down to the mist-hidden dike, and, in no more than ten short minutes, returned with an eel, protesting violently in that horrible way eels have, which he promptly proceeded to decapitate and eat.
All the weasel family, to which the polecat belongs, kill for the pure joy of killing, and in China one such animal will entirely depopulate a hen-roost in a single night. At six o'clock Yvette and I left camp with the lama and rode northeast. The plain swept away in long, grassy billows, and at every rise I stopped for a moment to scan the horizon with my glasses.
The success of the last part of this programme would of course depend on the location of General Hunter when I should arrive in the region where it would be practicable for us to communicate with each other. From my camp at New Castle ferry we crossed the Pamunkey, marched between Aylett's and Dunkirk on the Mattapony River, and on the 8th of June encamped at Polecat Station.
After all, the seeds of said dispoote is by no means important; it's enough to say that polecat finally has me thoroughly convinced. Followin' the difference an' my defeat, I'm witless enough to keep goin' on to school, whereas I should have returned homeward an' cast myse'f upon my parents as a sacred trust.
The polecat spun on herself, and bit, quick as an electric needle, at the spotted thing, that promptly ceased to be there, and, to use the professional term, she "made the stink" for all she was worth.
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