xperiment worth trying.

The gray squirrel is peculiarly an American product, and might serve
very well as a national emblem. The Old World can beat us on rats and
mice, but we are far ahead on squirrels, having five or six species to
Europe's one.

III. FOX AND HOUND.

I STOOD on a high hill or ridge one autumn day and saw a hound run a fox
through the fields far beneath me. What odors that fox must have shaken
out of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily, and how great their
specific gravity not to have been blown away like smoke by the breeze!
The fox ran a long distance down the hill, keeping within a few feet of
a stone wall; then turned a right angle and led off for the mountain,
across a plowed field and a succession of pasture lands. In about
fifteen minutes the hound came in full blast with her nose in the air,
and never once did she put it to the ground while in my sight. When she
came to the stone wall she took the other side from that taken by the
fox, and kept about the same distance from it, being thus separated
several yards from his track, with the fence between her and it. At the
point where the fox turned sharply to the left, the hound overshot a few
yards, then wheeled, and feeling the air a moment with her nose, took
up the scent again and was off on his trail as unerringly as fate. It
seemed as if the fox must have sowed himself broadcast as he went along,
and that his scent was so rank and heavy that it settled in the hollows
and clung tenaciously to the bushes and crevices in the fence. I thought
I ought to have caught a remnant of it as I passed that way some minutes
later, but I did not. But I suppose it was not that the light-footed fox
so impressed himself upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense of
the hound was so keen. To her sensitive nose these tracks steamed
like hot cakes, and they would not have cooled off so as to be
undistinguishable for several hours. For the time being she had but one
sense: her whole soul was concentrated in her nose.

It is amusing when the hunter starts out of a winter morning to see his
hound probe the old tracks to determine how recent they are. He sinks
his nose down deep in the snow so as to exclude the air from above, then
draws a long full breath, giving sometimes an audible snort. If there
remains the least effluvium of the fox the hound will detect it. If
it be very slight it only sets his tail wagging; if it be strong it
unloos