r 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 beneath them. In a moment a
weasel came in full course upon his trail, ran up the tree, then out
along the branch, from the end of which he leaped to the rocks as the
squirrel did, and plunged beneath them.

Doubtless the squirrel fell a prey to him. The squirrel's best game
would have been to have kept to the higher tree-tops, where he could
easily have distanced the weasel. But beneath the rocks he stood a very
poor chance. I have often wondered what keeps such an animal as the
weasel in check, for weasels are quite rare. They never need go hungry,
for rats and squirrels and mice and birds are everywhere. They probably
do not fall a prey to any other animal, and very rarely to man. But
the circumstances or agencies that check the increase of any species of
animal are, as Darwi