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Updated: May 22, 2025
The very last of the summer cottages were closed. Orham settled down for its regular winter hibernation. This year it was a bit less of a nap than usual because of the activity at the aviation camp at East Harniss.
The Fair quarter of the town was still in its state of ten months' hibernation, under padlock and key, and the normal town, effective as it was, with its white Kremlin crowning the turfed and terraced heights, possessed few charms to detain us. We embarked for Kazan.
We can imagine the pair of little shadow-tails within, sleeping fearlessly throughout all the coming night. But the sleep of the gray squirrel is a healthy and a natural one, not the half-dead trance of hibernation; and early next morning their sharp eyes appear at the entrance of their home and they are out and off through the tree-top path which only their feet can traverse.
Henceforth the evidence as to his doings is less extensive and less reliable. On his return he and his band seem to have passed the winter at Cap Rouge more comfortably than the first hibernation six years before, for the French had now learned the winter hygiene of the northern regions.
The toad is a nocturnal animal; it lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it shows a decided liking for crannies and crevices; it is wonderfully tenacious of life; it possesses the power of hibernation; it can live on extremely small quantities of food for very long periods of time together; it buries itself in mud or clay; it passes the early part of its life as a water-haunting tadpole; and last, not least, it can swell out its body to nearly double its natural size by inflating itself, which fully accounts for the stories of toads being taken out of holes every bit as big as themselves.
I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of temperature and vibration to feel the need even of nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was a pulseless void.
I was not alarmed, as I knew of its peculiarity, but it really was difficult to believe it ever could revive; there was no trace of warmth, or any apparent beating of the heart, and so it lay for some days, but on bringing it into a warm room it became as bright and active as ever. It seems a more intense form of hibernation than that of our squirrel and dormouse.
After we come to know more of the admirable family traits of the fledermaus its musical German name we shall willingly defend it from the calumny which for thousands of years has been heaped upon it. Hibernation is a strange phenomenon, and one which is but little understood.
To Miki and Neewa, especially Neewa, there seemed nothing extraordinary in the fact that they were together again, and that their comradeship was resumed. Although during his months of hibernation Neewa's body had grown, his mind had not changed its memories or its pictures.
The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life, in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation.
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