Yellowstone Park is the
Picket-Pin Ground-squirrel. On every level, dry prairie along the great
river I found it in swarms.

[Illustration]

It looks much like a common Squirrel, but its coat has become more
mud-coloured, and its tail is reduced by long ages of neglect to a mere
vestige of the ancestral banner. It has developed great powers of
burrowing, but it never climbs anything higher than the little mound
that it makes about the door of its home.

The Picket-pin is an interesting and picturesque creature in some ways,
but it has one habit that I cannot quite condone. In this land of sun
and bright blue air, this world of outdoor charm, it comes forth tardily
in late spring, as late sometimes as the first of May, and promptly
retires in mid-August, when blazing summer is on the face of the earth,
and the land is a land of plenty. Down it goes after three and one half
short months, to sleep for eight and a half long ones; and since during
these three and a half months it is above ground only in broad daylight,
this means that for only two months of the year it is active, and the
other ten, four fifths of its life, it passes in a deathlike sleep.

Of course, the Picket-pin might reply that it has probably as many hours
of active life as any of its kind, only it breaks them up into sections,
with long blanks of rest between. Whether this defense is a good one or
not, we have no facts at present to determine.

[Illustration]

It has a fashion of sitting up straight on the doorway mound when it
wishes to take an observation, and the more it is alarmed by the
approach of an enemy the straighter it sits up, pressing its paws tight
to its ribs, so that at a short distance it looks like a picket-pin of
wood; hence the name.

Oftentimes some tenderfoot going in the evening to stake out his horse
and making toward the selected patch of grassy prairie, exclaims, "Good
Luck! here's a picket-pin already driven in." But on leading up his
horse within ten or twelve feet of the pin, it gives a little "_chirr_"
and dives down out of sight. Then the said tenderfoot realizes why the
creature got the name.

The summer of 1897 I spent in the Park about Yancey's and there had
daily chances of seeing the Picket-pin and learning its ways, for the
species was there in thousands on the little prairie about my cabin. I
think I am safe in saying that there were ten families to the acre of
land on all the level prairie in this valley.