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They perforate the bark of the branches of the maples with their chisel-like teeth, and suck the sweet liquid as it slowly oozes out. It is not much as food, but evidently it helps. I have said the red squirrel does not lay by a store of food for winter use, like the chipmunk and the wood-mice; yet in the fall he sometimes hoards in a tentative, temporary kind of way.
Time after time they passed and repassed below him, until at last they were utterly weary, and crouched in a huddled mass together, with uplifted hunted eyes. Then the rats and mice and voles. House-mice and wood-mice, red voles, and grey. Last of all, Berus the adder. Not a mouse stepped aside, as he worked his slow, sinuous length between the cornstalks. He, too, was of the hunted to-day.
While the ram was lying down they came out of their secret holes and played about securely, seeming to realize that the big animal's presence was a safeguard to them. But when he moved, and they saw the rope trail sinuously behind him through the scanty grass, they were almost paralyzed with panic. Such a snake as that would require all the wood-mice on Ringwaak to assuage his appetite.
He saw his friend the shrewmouse scuffling with its mate; he saw the wood-mice nut-grubbing; he saw the night reunion of the stump-tailed voles; but the first of his own kind that he saw was mother. He had swung himself to the top of a broken twig, and, as he looked down, perceived her climbing stiffly up towards him.
In the most barren cliffs and gulches there dwell a multitude of lesser animals, well-dressed, clear-eyed, happy little beasts wood-rats, kangaroo-rats, gophers, wood-mice, skunks, rabbits, bob cats, and many others, gathering food, or dozing in their sun-warmed dens. Lizards, too, of every kind and color are here enjoying life on the hot cliffs, and making the brightest of them brighter.
The provident wood-mice and the chipmunk are laying by a winter supply of nuts or grain, the former usually in decayed trees, the latter in the ground. I have observed that any unusual disturbance in the woods, near where the chipmunk has his den, will cause him to shift his quarters.
The doors and window-frames, the cupboards and the shelves for the crockery, were all of dark oak, fashioned into leaves and ferns, with birds on their nests, and timid rabbits, and still more timid wood-mice peeping out of their coverts, cocks crowing with uplifted crest, and chickens nestling under the hen-mother's wings, sheaves of corn, and tall, club-headed bulrushes all the objects familiar to a country life.
There were grouse nests to rifle, there were squirrels, hare, wood-mice, chipmunks, to exercise all the craft and skill of the raccoons. Also there were the occasional unwary trout, chub, or suckers, to be scooped up upon the borders of the brook. And once, more in hate than in hunger, the old mother raccoon had the fierce joy of eradicating a nest of weasels, which she found in a pile of rocks.
They fairly fell backward into their burrows, where they crouched quivering in the darkest recesses, not daring to show their noses again for hours. Neither weasel nor wood-mice, nor the chickadees which came to eye him saucily, seemed to the big ram worth a moment's attention.
Wood-mice pushed their winding tunnels and made their vaulted play rooms deep under the drifts, where none might molest nor make them afraid; and all game grew wary and wild, learning from experience, as it always does, that only the keen can survive the fall hunting.
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