Everyday Adventures

It is the same way with celestial rabbits. Look any clear winter night down below the belt of Orion, and you will see a great rabbit-track in the sky – the constellation of Lepus, the Hare, whose track leads away from the Great Dog with baleful Sirius gleaming green in his fell jaw.

From the rabbit-meadow we followed devious paths down through Fern Valley, which in summertime is a green mass of cinnamon fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, brake, regal fern, and half a score of others. In the midst of the marsh were rows of the fruit-stems of the sensitive fern, which is the first to blacken before the frost. These were heavy with rich wine-brown seed-pods, filled with seeds like fine dust. They had an oily, nutty taste; and it would seem as if some hungry mouse or bird would find them good eating during famine times. Yet so far as I have observed they are never fed upon.

Along the side of the path were thickets of spice-bush, whose crushed leaves in summer have an incense sweeter than burns in any censer of man’s making. To-day I broke one of the brittle branches, to nibble the perfumed bark, and found at the end of a twig, pretending to be a withered leaf, a cocoon of the prometheus moth. The leaf had been folded together, lined with spun silk, and lashed so strongly that the twig would break before the silken cable.

We passed through a clump of staghorn sumac with branches like antlers, bearing at their ends heavy masses of fruit-clusters made up of hundreds of dark, velvety crimson berries, each containing a brown seed. The pulp of these berries is intensely sour, its flavor giving the sumac its other name of “vinegar plant.” These red clusters crushed in sweetened water make a very good imitation of the red circus-lemonade of our childhood. The staghorn is not to be confounded with its treacherous sister, the poison sumac, with her corpse-colored berries. She is a vitriol-thrower, and with her death-pale bark and arsenic-green leaves, always makes me think of one of those haggard, horrible women of the Terror.

It was in Fern Valley that the Botanist made his discovery for the day. It was only a tree, and moreover a tree that he must have passed many times before. Only to-day, however, did it catch his eye. The bark was that of an oak, but the leaves, which clung thick and brown to the limb, were long, with a straight edge something like the leaves of the willow-oak, only broader and larger. It was no other than the laurel-oak, a tree which by all rights belonged hundreds of miles to the south of us.

He walked gloatingly around his discovery, and it was some time before I could drag him on. Thereafter he gave me a masterly discourse, some forty minutes in duration, on the life-history of the oaks, and propounded several ingenious theories to account for the presence of this strange species. This discourse continued until we reached the historic white oak near the end of the valley, where the Botanist once found a flock of bay-breasted warblers in the middle of a rainstorm; and again I heard the story of that day.

Through the valley flowed a little stream, and the snow along its banks told of the goings and comings of the wild-folk. Gray squirrels, red squirrels, muskrats, rabbits, mice, foxes, weasels, all had passed and repassed along these banks.

To me the most interesting trail was that of a blarina shrew. His track in the snow is a strange one. It is a round, tunnel-like trail, like that of some large caterpillar, with the trough made by the wallowing little body filled with tiny alternate tracks – one of the strangest of all the winter trails.

I could obtain very little enthusiasm from the Botanist over blarinas. He still babbled of laurel-leafed oaks and similar frivolities. Even the crowning event of the walk left him cold. It came on the home-stretch. We were passing through the last pasture before reaching the humdrum turnpike which led to the tame-folk. Suddenly in the snow I saw a strange trail. It was evidently made by a jumper, but not one whose track I knew. I followed it, until among the leaves in a bank something moved. Before my astonished eyes hopped falteringly, but bravely, a speckled toad.

The winter sun shone palely on his brown back still crusted with the earth of his chill home. Down under the leaves and the frozen ground he had heard the call, and struggled to the surface, expecting to find spring awaiting him. Two jumps, however, had landed him in a snowbank. It was a disillusion, and Mr. Toad winked his mild brown eyes piteously. He struggled bravely to get out, but every jump plunged him deeper into the snow. His movements became feebler as the little warmth his cold blood contained oozed out.

FLYER, THE SQUIRREL

Just as he was settling despairingly back into the crystallized cold, I rescued him. He was too far gone even to move, for cold spells quick death to the reptile folk. Only his blinking beautiful eyes, like lignite flecked with gold, and the slow throbbing of his mottled breast, showed that life was still in him. He nestled close in my hand, willing to occupy it until warm weather.

I back-tracked him from his faltering efforts, and where his first lusty jump showed on the thawing ground I found his hibernaculum. It was only a little hollow, scarcely three inches deep, under sodden leaves and wet earth, and cheerless enough, according to mammalian ideas. It was evidently home for Mr. Toad, and when I set him therein, he scrambled relievedly under some of the loose wet leaves which had fallen back into his nest. I piled a generous measure of dripping leaves and moist earth over his warted back. It may have been imagination, but I fancied that the last look I had from his bright eyes was one of gratitude. The Botanist scoffed at the

idea, for toads, like pine-snakes, convey absolutely no appeal to his narrow, flower-bound nature.

I have erected a monument in the shape of a chestnut stake beside Mr. Toad’s winter residence, and I strongly suspect that he will be the last of his family to get up when the spring rising-bell finally rings.

“There’s positively nothing to this early-rising business,” I can hear him telling his friends at the Puddle Club in April. “Look at what happened to me. If it hadn’t been for a well-meaning giant, I would have caught my death of cold from getting out of bed too soon. Never again!”

Our calendar-makers use red letters to mark special days. Personally, I prefer orchids and birds and sunrises and nests and snakes and similar markers. I have in my diary “The Day of the Prothonotary Warbler,” “The Day of the Henslow’s Sparrow’s Nest” (that was a day!), “The Day of the Fringed Gentian,” and many, many others. But always and forever that snowy 21st of December is marked in my memory as “The Day of the Early Toad.”

Once more I was climbing the Cobble. The wood-road on which I started had narrowed to a path. Overhead masses of rock showed through the snow, and above them were the dark depths of the Bear-Hole where Great-great-uncle Jake had once shot with his flintlock musket the largest bear ever killed in that part of the state. It was here at the cliff side that Shahrazad snow told me another story.

Along the edge of the slope ran a track made up of four holes in the snow. The front ones were far apart and the back ones near apart. Occasionally, instead of four holes, five would show in the snow, and the position of the marks was reversed. A little farther on, and the trail changed. The two near-apart tracks were now in a perpendicular line instead of side by side. To Chingachgook, or Deerslayer, or Daniel Boone, or any other well-known tracker, the trail would have, of course, been an open book. But it had taken an amateur trailer like myself some years to be able to read that snow record aright. The trail was that of a cottontail rabbit. At first he had been hopping contentedly along, with an eye open for anything eatable in the line of winter vegetables. The far-apart tracks were the paw-marks of the big hind-legs, which came in front of the marks made by the fore-paws as they touched the ground at every hop. The five marks were where he had sat down to look around. The fifth mark was the mark of his stubby tail, and when he stopped, the little fore-paws made the near-apart marks in front of the far-apart marks of his hind-feet, instead of behind them as when he hopped.

Suddenly the rabbit detected something alarming coming from behind, for the sedate hops changed into startled bounds. A little farther on the trail said that the rabbit had caught sight of its pursuer as it ran; for a rabbit by the position of its eyes sees backward and forward equally well. The tracks showed a frantic burst of speed. In an effort to get every possible bit of leverage, the fore-legs were twisted so that they struck the ground one behind the other, which accounted for the last set of marks perpendicular to those in front. A line of tracks which came from a pile of stones, and paralleled the rabbit’s trail, told the whole story. The paw-marks were small and dainty, but beyond each pad-print were the marks of fierce claws. No wonder the rabbit ran wild when it first scented its enemy, and then saw its long slim body bounding along behind, white as snow except for the black tip of its tail.

It was the weasel, whose long body moves like the uncoiling of a steel spring. A weasel running looks like a gigantic inch-worm that bounds instead of crawls. Speed, however, is not what the little white killer depends on for its prey. It can follow a trail by scent better than any hound, climb trees nearly as well as a squirrel; and if the animal it is chasing goes into a burrow, it has gone to certain death. The rabbit’s only chance would have been a straight-away run at full speed for miles and hours. In this way it could probably have tired out the weasel, which is a killer, not a runner, by profession. A rabbit, however, like the fox, never runs straight. Round and round in great circles it runs about its feeding-ground, of which it knows all the paths and runways and burrows. Against a dog or fox these are safer tactics than exploring new territory. Against a weasel they are usually fatal.

It was easy to see on the snow what had happened. At first, when the rabbit saw the weasel looping along its trail like a hunting snake, it had started off with a sprint that in a minute carried it out of sight. Then a strange thing happened. Although a rabbit can run for an hour at nearly top speed, and in this case had every reason to run, after a half-mile of rapid circling and doubling, the trail changed and showed that the rabbit was plodding along as if paralyzed.

One of the weird and unexplained facts in nature is the strange power that a weasel appears to have over all the smaller animals. Many of them simply give up and wait for death when they find that a weasel is on their trail. A red squirrel, which could easily escape through the tree-tops, sometimes becomes almost hysterical with fright, and has been known to fall out of a tree-top in a perfect ecstasy of terror. Even the rat, which is a cynical, practical animal, with no nerves, and a bitter, brave fighter when fight it must, loses its head when up against a weasel. A friend of mine once saw a grim, gray old fellow run squealing aloud across a road from a woodpile and plunge into a stone wall. A moment later a weasel in its reddish summer coat came sniffing along the rat’s trail and passed within a yard of him.

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