them, boy-like, simply to thwart their purpose. One of the weasels was
disabled by my shot, but the troop was not discouraged, and, after
making several feints to cross, one of them seized the wounded one and
bore it over, and the pack disappeared in the wall on the other side.

Let me conclude this chapter with two or three notes about this alert
enemy of the birds and the lesser animals, the weasel.

A farmer one day heard a queer growling sound in the grass;
on approaching the spot he saw two weasels contending over a mouse;
each had hold of the mouse pulling in opposite directions, and were so
absorbed in the struggle that the farmer cautiously put his hands down
and grabbed them both by the back of the neck. He put them in a cage,
and offered them bread and other food. This they refused to eat,
but in a few days one of them had eaten the other up, picking his bones
clean and leaving nothing but the skeleton.

The same farmer was one day in his cellar when two rats came out of a
hole near him in great haste, and ran up the cellar wall and along its
top till they came to a floor timber that stopped their progress,
when they turned at bay, and looked excitedly back along the course
they had come. In a moment a weasel, evidently in hot pursuit of them,
came out of the hole, and seeing the farmer, checked his course and
darted back. The rats had doubtless turned to give him fight,
and would probably have been a match for him.

The weasel seems to track its game by scent. A hunter of my
acquaintance was one day sitting in the woods, when he saw
a red squirrel run with great speed up a tree near him, and out
upon a long branch, from which he leaped to some rocks, and disappeared