kill every red squirrel that infests the place; kill every weasel also.
The weasel is a subtle and arch enemy of the birds. It climbs trees
and explores them with great ease and nimbleness. I have seen it do so
on several occasions. One day my attention was arrested by the angry
notes of a pair of brown-thrashers that were flitting from bush to bush
along an old stone row in a remote field. Presently I saw what it was
that excited them--three large red weasels, or ermines coming along the
stone wall, and leisurely and half playfully exploring every tree that
stood near it. They had probably robbed the thrashers. They would go
up the trees with great ease, and glide serpent-like out upon the main
branches. When they descended the tree they were unable to come
straight down, like a squirrel, but went around it spirally.
How boldly they thrust their heads out of the wall, and eyed me and
sniffed me, as I drew near,--their round, thin ears, their prominent,
glistening, bead-like eyes, and the curving, snake-like motions of the
head and neck being very noticeable. They looked like blood-suckers
and egg-suckers. They suggested something extremely remorseless and
cruel. One could understand the alarm of the rats when they discover
one of these fearless, subtle, and circumventing creatures threading
their holes. To flee must be like trying to escape death itself.
I was one day standing in the woods upon a flat stone, in what at
certain seasons was the bed of a stream, when one of these weasels came
undulating along and ran under the stone upon which I was standing.
As I remained motionless, he thrust his wedge-shaped head, and turned
it back above the stone as if half in mind to seize my foot; then he
drew back, and presently went his way. These weasels often hunt in
packs like the British stoat. When I was a boy, my father one day
armed me with an old musket and sent me to shoot chipmunks around the
corn. While watching the squirrels, a troop of weasels tried to cross
a bar-way where I sat, and were so bent on doing it that I fired at