inches long, bearing half-a-dozen empty acorn-cups, which twigs have been
gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the nuts, in order to make them
more portable. The jays scream and the red squirrels scold while you are
clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees, for they are there on the same
errand, and two of a trade never agree. I frequently see a red or gray
squirrel cast down a green chestnut bur, as I am going through the woods,
and I used to think, sometimes, that they were cast at me. In fact, they
are so busy about it, in the midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot
stand long in the woods without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that
he had, the day before,--that was in the middle of October,--seen a green
chestnut bur dropt on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest
wood, and much further from the nearest chestnut-tree, and he could not
tell how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I
find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under the
leaves, by the common wood-mouse (_mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation and
planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In almost
every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have pawed down
through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet deep, and almost
always directly to a nut or a pine-cone, as directly as if they had
started from it and bored upward,--which you and I could not have done. It
would be difficult for us to find one before the snow falls. Commonly, no
doubt, they had deposited them there in the fall. You wonder if they
remember the localities, or discover them by the scent. The red squirrel
commonly has its winter abode in the earth under a thicket of evergreens,
frequently under a small clump of evergreens in the midst of a deciduous
wood. If there are any nut-trees, which still retain their nuts, standing
at a distance without the wood, their paths often lead directly to and
from them. We, therefore, need not suppose an oak standing here and there