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Updated: June 28, 2025
The Indian explained: "Every fox that travels near will come and smell the stone to see who of his kind is around, so this is a good place for a fox-trap; a steel trap, of course, for no fox will go into a deadfall." And slowly Rolf learned that these habits are seen in some measure in all animals; yes, down to the mice and shrews.
I cannot even print it here in full, but the vital facts can be stated, briefly and in plain figures. Several of these pests work secretly. At husking time the wretched ear-worm that ruins the terminal quarter or fifth of an immense number of ears, is painfully in evidence. The root-worms work insidiously, and the moles and shrews are supposed to attack them and destroy them.
But, beside these, insects for swallows, swifts, martins, shrikes, thrushes, orioles, sparrows, the beautiful trogans and jacamars, moles, shrews, hedgehogs, and a multitude of others, too numerous to mention, but not too numerous to eat. Ants, also, for the ant-eaters of America, the aard-vark of Africa, and the pangolin of Asia.
Perhaps she was a loud-voiced termagant; perhaps merely the ill-used wife of a drunken wretch, who well deserved her scolding; or the daring teller of home truths to some jack-in-office, who thus revenged himself. We have shrews and scolds still; happily they are restrained in a less barbarous fashion. You may still see some fearsome branks in museums.
I immediately resolved to secure these animals, whatever they might prove to be, and, armed with leather gloves, and an empty glass globe to place my captures in, I began to search in the straw, and soon secured the supposed rats, but they proved to be a pair of water shrews jet black, lively little creatures, with sharply-pointed snouts and teeth, as I soon discovered to my cost.
He will not come away much wiser perhaps, but he will be appreciably sadder. And so this long procession of shrews passes before us, scolding and gibbering and dispensing miseries. Is there no way of appealing to reason so that they may be led to see that inflicting pain can never bring them anything but a low degree of pleasure?
This line of thought would carry me back over more ages than I care to traverse; I am content with knowing that the shrews are in a minority, and that the majority of my countrywomen are sweet and benign.
Two hundred pellets consisting of bones, hair and feathers from one nesting pair of these birds were collected, and found to contain 454 skulls, of which 225 were of meadow mice, 179 of house mice, 2 of pine mice, 20 were of rats, 6 of jumping mice, 20 were from shrews, 1 was of a mole and 1 a vesper sparrow. One bird, and 453 noxious mammals! Compare this with the record of any cat on earth.
But the artist-woman never marries for the sake of being married or rather for the sake of not being unmarried as so many of her more ordinary sisters do; her art supplies her with that necessary interest in life, without which most women become either invalids or shrews, and unless she happens to meet the right man she can manage very well without him.
Instead of the thinly haired mouselike tails of the ordinary shrews the tupaias have developed long bushy tails and in fact look and act so much like squirrels that it is difficult to convince the white residents of Yün-nan, who are accustomed to see them run about the hedges and walls of their courtyards that the two are quite unrelated.
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