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Updated: May 7, 2025
There is the little field-mouse, a short-eared and short-tailed little creature with a thick neck and of a red-brown color. It feeds on grain and seeds, and when hard pressed for food will also eat the bark of trees. =Kangaroo-Rat, Jumping Mouse=
But this similarity is not confined only to the vegetable kingdom. The birds and animals are many of them also alike. The white and the black cockatoo are common to the three colonies, as are many kinds of the smaller parrots, the kangaroo, and the kangaroo-rat, the numbat, the opossum, the native cat, and many others.
In the underbrush near a meadow and at the edges of thickets you may possibly see, though they are not common, a diminutive animal, beautiful in form and color and of most interesting habits. In the Southwest it is called the kangaroo-rat, but North and East it is known as the jumping mouse.
And the rest of the pack fared quite tolerably well, sharing between them a kangaroo-rat, two bandicoots, a wallaby-hare, and quite a considerable number of marsupial mice, besides about half of a big carpet-snake which Finn killed. For a week now the little pack travelled on in a north-westerly direction, and every day old Tufter growled a little more bitterly and with a little better cause.
But no one explains what the art of it is; nor how it gets around that law of nature which says you shall not throw any two-ounce thing 220 yards, either through the air or bumping along the ground. Rev. J. G. Woods says: "The distance to which the weet-weet or kangaroo-rat can be thrown is truly astonishing.
She learned to hold a frenzied fox-terrier at the mouth of a hollow log, ready to pounce on the kangaroo-rat which had taken refuge there, and which flashed out as if shot from a catapult on being poked from the other end with a long stick. She learned to mark the hiding-place of the young wild-ducks that scuttled and dived, and hid themselves with such super-natural cunning in the reedy pools.
In vain I tried to encourage the dog to lead the way; he would not stir from my side. Only once he darted after a kangaroo-rat, and caught it before it had gone twenty yards. This afforded a breakfast which I envied him. I now pushed on towards the coast, but was continually intercepted by thick swamps impossible to penetrate, and turned from the right direction.
With a swiftness which Finn's sharp eyes were unable to follow exactly, the snake twisted two coils of his shining body round the marsupial and crushed the little beast to death. Then, slowly, and as though the process gave him great satisfaction, the snake worked his coils downward, from the head to the tail of the kangaroo-rat, crunching its body flat and breaking all its joints.
Finn might, and frequently did, ask a stray bandicoot, or rabbit, or kangaroo-rat to dinner; but by the time the meal was ended, the guest was no more; and so the acquaintance could never be pursued further. Finn would have been delighted, really, to make friends with creatures like the bandicoot people, and to enjoy their society at intervals when he was well fed.
When the snake had quite finished, Finn leaped upon it from his hiding-place, killing the creature with one snap of his jaws immediately behind the head. Finn's front teeth actually met in the tail of the kangaroo-rat, which had only reached thus far in its progress.
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