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Updated: June 3, 2025
'Cause my biggest brother says gray gophers don't worry no more 'bout losin' their tails than tadpoles do." He grunted again, and the little girl, eager and impatient, turned the blind black pony about in circles. "Ay catch 'em, ay kill 'em," the Swede boy said finally. There was a significant tone in his voice, and a gleam in the pale eyes under the tow hair. "An' yo' gate th' mownay," he added.
A number of tame parrots and parakeets, of several different species, scrambled over the roofs and entered the houses. In the open pastures near by were the curious, extensive burrows of a gopher rat, which ate the roots of grass, not emerging to eat the grass but pulling it into the burrows by the roots. These burrows bore a close likeness to those of our pocket gophers.
There was a squeak and a thin, whimpering crying and the little black dog, at least, was sure of his supper. Annie-Many-Ponies, roused from her brooding, shivered a little when the rabbit cried. She started forward to save it she who had taught the little black dog to hunt gophers and prairie-dogs! and when she was too late she scolded the dog in the language of the Sioux.
Steve was standing some yards away, with his horse's reins linked over his arm. As the woman approached he moved forward to meet her. But his eyes were on the boy, still in vain pursuit of the escaped gophers, pausing, stalking, completely and utterly absorbed. The woman realized the white man's pre-occupation. She was even glad of it. So, in her simple way, she explained.
She lay there for hours, entirely unaware of the saucy stares of several gophers who paused in their hunt for kernels and stood straight as picket-pins to watch and wonder at the little heap of pink calico under the battered sailor-hat, or whisked about her, their short legs flashing, their tails wide and bushy, their cheek-pouches so full of kernels that they smiled fatly when they looked at her, and showed four long front teeth.
I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground.
"Sure," he said drily. "But I didn't get him." "No." The boy turned regretful eyes towards the open, where he, too, had just failed to bag his quarry. "You kill 'em when you get 'em, Uncle. We do, don't we, An-ina?" he added, appealing for corroboration. "We always kills 'em, Uncle Steve," he went on, "'cos gophers are very bad." "Yes. Gophers are bad, old fellow. Always kill them.
If there is any positive evidence tending to prove that the small carnivores that we class as "vermin" are industrious and persistent destroyers of noxious rodents pocket gophers, moles, field-mice and rats or that they do not kill wild birds numerously, now is the time to produce it, because the tide of public sentiment is strongly setting against the weasels, mink, foxes and skunks.
"Very good, Peter, very good," replied Old Mother Nature, "That's as much as I expected you would be able to find out. Digger is a queer fellow. His home is on the great plains and in the flat, open country of the Middle West and Far West, where Gophers and Ground Squirrels and Prairie Dogs live. They furnish him with the greater part of his food.
Not until then did the utterly exhausted little tan-faced cub lie down, but when he did lie down he was so dead tired that he was sound asleep in three minutes. Twice again during the early part of the afternoon the sapoos oowin worked on Thor, and he began to feel hungry. It was not the sort of hunger to be appeased by ants and grubs, or even gophers and whistlers.
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