ruffled
feathers, nodding and chirping and looking down at us as if wondering
what in the bird world we had been doing to him. This of course
banished all thought of killing, as far as that revived woodpecker was
concerned, no matter how many ears of corn he might spoil, and we all
heartily congratulated him on his wonderful, triumphant resurrection
from three kinds of death,--shooting, neck-wringing, and destructive
concussion. I suppose only one pellet had touched him, glancing on his
head.

Another extraordinary shooting-affair happened one summer morning
shortly after daybreak. When I went to the stable to feed the horses I
noticed a big white-breasted hawk on a tall oak in front of the
chicken-house, evidently waiting for a chicken breakfast. I ran to the
house for the gun, and when I fired he fell about halfway down the
tree, caught a branch with his claws, hung back downward and fluttered
a few seconds, then managed to stand erect. I fired again to put him
out of pain, and to my surprise the second shot seemed to restore his
strength instead of killing him, for he flew out of the tree and over
the meadow with strong and regular wing-beats for thirty or forty rods
apparently as well as ever, but died suddenly in the air and dropped
like a stone.

We hunted muskrats whenever we had time to run down to the lake. They
are brown bunchy animals about twenty-three inches long, the tail
being about nine inches in length, black in color and flattened
vertically for sculling, and the hind feet are half-webbed. They look
like little beavers, usually have from ten to a dozen young, are
easily tamed and make interesting pets. We liked to watch them at
their work and at their meals. In the spring when the snow vanishes
and the lake ice begins to melt, the first open spot is always used as
a feeding-place, where they dive from the edge of the ice and in a
minute or less reappear with a mussel or a mouthful of pontederia or
water-lily leaves, climb back on to the ice and sit up to nibble their
food, handling it very much like squirrels or marmots. It is then that
they are most easily shot, a solitary hunter oftentimes shooting
thirty or forty in a single day. Their nests on the rushy margins of
lakes and streams, far from being hidden like those of most birds, are
conspicuously large, and conical in shape like Indian wigwams. They
are built of plants--rushes, sedges, mosses, etc.--and ornamented
around the base with mussel-sh