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The woods were all still after that; jays and squirrels seemed appalled at the tragedy, and avoided me as if I were responsible for the still little body under the hemlock tips. An hour passed; then, a quarter-mile away, in the direction that the deer had taken in the early morning, a single jay set up his cry, the cry of something new passing in the woods.
Sometimes they saw a few red squirrels too, but there was generally war between them and the black ones. In these lonely forests, everything seems still and silent, during the long wintry season, as if death had spread a white pall over, the earth, and hushed every living thing into silence.
On sultry afternoons she watched lengthening tree-shadows creep across the reddish-brown carpeting of straw, and in the long nights when sleeplessness betrayed her into the clutches of torturing retrospection, she waited and longed for the pearly lustre that paved the east for the rosy feet of dawn; listened to the beating of Nature's heart in the solemn roar of the Falls two miles away, in the strophe and anti-strophe of winds quivering through pine tops, the startled cry of birds dozing in cedar thickets, the shrill droning of crickets, the monotonous recrimination of katydids, the peculiar, querulous call of a family of flying squirrels housed in the cleft of an old magnolia, the Gregorian chant of frogs cradled in the sedge and ferns, where the river lapped and gurgled.
All this time the catamount screeched upon the reserved lot of the Skyland Board of Trade, the opossum swung by his tail over the site of the exposition hall, and the owl hooted a melancholy recitative to his audience of young squirrels in opera house square.
It is a very old secret now, and to make it plain you must first hear why the Brierbrush quarrelled with the beasts. Long ago the Roses used to grow on bushes that had no thorns. But the Squirrels and Mice used to climb after them, the cattle used to knock them off with their horns, the Possum would twitch them off with his long tail, and the Deer, with his sharp hoofs, would break them down.
She listened to the nagging chatter of the squirrels, mingled with the fluttering of the forest birds high above her head. As she stood on the hill, the only human being in all the wilderness about, in fancy she seemed to be at the very top of the world.
This close association of the rats and the squirrels affords a good opportunity for the fleas infesting them to pass from one host to the other. So far only two species of fleas have been recorded from the ground-squirrels. One, Ceratophyllus acutus, is very common, sometimes literally swarming over the squirrels, particularly if a squirrel is sick or weak from any cause.
She sat in an old leathern chair, her feet on a coyote-skin, looking about her with quick bright motions that made the big fellow think of the shy field creatures that sometimes strayed over his threshold ground squirrels, rabbits, and the like. David lay curled up close beside her, and half a dozen less-favored dogs looked wistfully in from time to time.
Mile after mile they journeyed, a troop of interested people coming after, the sun and the clear sweet air, the waving grass, the occasional clearings where settlers had driven in the tent-pegs of home, the forest now and then swallowing them, the mountains rising above them like a blank wall, and then suddenly opening out before them; and the rustle and scamper of squirrels and coyotes; and over their heads the whistle of birds, the slow beat of wings of great wild-fowl.
Besides these there are thirteen Rodents and four Insectivora, including a shrew-mouse and six squirrels, whose unaided passage over twenty miles of sea is even more inconceivable than that of the larger animals. But when we come to the cases of the same species inhabiting two of the more widely separated islands, the difficulty is much increased.
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