curious and
interesting in connection with these mischievous gophers, though just
then they were doing no harm. As I strolled through the stubble
watching for a chance for a shot, a shrike flew past me and alighted
on an open spot at the mouth of a burrow about thirty yards ahead of
me. Curious to see what he was up to, I stood still to watch him. He
looked down the gopher hole in a listening attitude, then looked back
at me to see if I was coming, looked down again and listened, and
looked back at me. I stood perfectly still, and he kept twitching his
tail, seeming uneasy and doubtful about venturing to do the savage job
that I soon learned he had in his mind. Finally, encouraged by my
keeping so still, to my astonishment he suddenly vanished in the
gopher hole.

[Illustration: COMBINED THERMOMETER, HYGROMETER, BAROMETER AND
PYROMETER
Invented by the author in his boyhood]

A bird going down a deep narrow hole in the ground like a ferret or a
weasel seemed very strange, and I thought it would be a fine thing to
run forward, clap my hand over the hole, and have the fun of
imprisoning him and seeing what he would do when he tried to get out.
So I ran forward but stopped when I got within a dozen or fifteen
yards of the hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to
wait and see what would naturally happen without my interference.
While I stood there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance
going on in the burrow, a mixed lot of keen squeaking, shrieking,
distressful cries, telling that down in the dark something terrible
was being done. Then suddenly out popped a half-grown gopher, four and
a half or five inches long, and, without stopping a single moment to
choose a way of escape, ran screaming through the stubble straight
away from its home, quickly followed by another and another, until
some half-dozen were driven out, all of them crying and running in
different directions as if at this dreadful time home, sweet home, was
the most dangerous and least desirable of any place in the wide world.
Then out came the shrike, flew above the run-away gopher children,
and, diving on them, killed them one after another with blows at the
back of the skull. He then seized one of them, dragged it to the top
of a small clod so as to be able to get a start, and laboriously made
out to fly with it about ten or fifteen yards, when he alighted to
rest. Then he dragged it to the top of another clod and flew with it