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Updated: May 12, 2025
Latterly the naturalists of North America have been very active in their researches, and no genus of animals has rewarded them so well as the marmots unless, perhaps, it may be the squirrels. Almost every year a new species of one or the other of these has been found mostly inhabiting the vast wilderness territories that lie between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean.
He lives on grass and other green things and, like Johnny Chuck, gets very fat in the fall and then sleeps all winter. There are one or two other Marmots in the Far West who live farther south than does Whistler, but their habits are much the same as those of Whistler and Johnny Chuck. None of them are social. I mean by that you never find two Marmot homes very close together.
The black bear has killed and will kill men when brought to bay or wounded or even when he feels himself cornered. Although largely vegetarian, bear also capture and devour prey. Young deer, marmots, ground squirrels, sheep, and cattle are their diet. In certain districts great damage is done to flocks by bears that have become killers.
There are many marmots in their country, which they call Sogur, which gather during winter, in companies of twenty or thirty together, in burrows, where they sleep for six months; these they catch in great numbers and use as food. There are likewise a kind of rabbits, with long tails like cats, having black and white hairs at the extremity of their tails.
"Look yonder, there are several of them caved in, and guttered by the rain! What is the reason, I wonder?" "These are the ones in which the owls live," replied Lucien. "See! yonder goes an owl into one this very moment! It is supposed that the owls have taken these from the marmots, and use them exclusively for their own dwellings; and, as you perceive, they do not keep them in repair.
This has not been explained; nor is it known why they choose these barren tracts for their dwelling-places, in preference to the more fertile prairies. All these things await the study and observation of the historian of nature. Basil was surprised to observe that the marmots were not alone the occupants of their town.
Pine-trees marched up the sun-warmed moraines in long, hopeful files, taking the ground and establishing themselves as soon as it was ready for them; brown-spiked sedges fringed the shores of the newborn lakes; young rivers roared in the abandoned channels of the glaciers; flowers bloomed around the feet of the great burnished domes, while with quick fertility mellow beds of soil, settling and warming, offered food to multitudes of Nature's waiting children, great and small, animals as well as plants; mice, squirrels, marmots, deer, bears, elephants, etc.
The prairie dogs or marmots were in tens of thousands round us, and I used to amuse myself by shooting at one in particular with the rifle. His hole was a hundred yards from our camp, and he would come out and sit on his hill every now and again, and then go nibbling round at the grass. I shot at him a dozen times, and once cut the ground under his belly, but never killed him.
The blaireau, seeing that further concealment was no longer of any use, raised himself higher upon his limbs, and sprang forward in pursuit. He was too late, however, as the marmots had all got into their holes, and their angry "seek-seek," was heard proceeding from various quarters out of the bowels of the earth.
Upon it roams the buffalo, the prong-horned antelope, and the mule-deer. There, too, may be seen the "barking-wolf" and the "swift fox." It is the favourite home of the marmots, and the gauffres or sand-rats; and there, too, the noblest of animals, the horse, runs wild. West of this prairie tract is a region of far different aspect, the region of the Rocky Mountains.
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